This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website.
How does Hollywood deal with a topic like death? Apparently in a careful, repeated, methodic manner. Check out the filmmaker Kristy Guevara-Flanagan’s latest short documentary called What Happened To Her and you will find an unintended tutorial on how (not) to represent dead female bodies.
What Happened to Her is a brilliant and powerful work that reveals Hollywood filmmakers’ bizarre obsession with showing pretty female corpses on screen.
Indeed, there seems to be a pattern in the way Hollywood chooses its victims. What do these unmoving/still/statue-like bodies have in common? Apparently, many things: they are female, in their 20s-30s, almost exclusively white, naked, thin, and deadly sexy. Think about last time you watched an episode of CSI: wasn’t the victim an attractive young woman? And there is barely any variation to this: we can rarely see, for example, naked male bodies or old overweight bodies in these films.
But What happened to her brings also an uncommon perspective to the documentary. Can you imagine being an actor whose role is to be dead throughout the whole film? The narrator of What Happened to Her, Danyi Deats, did exactly that when she played a naked dead body in the 80’s cult movie River’s Edge. In What Happened To Her she gives account of her traumatizing experience of playing this role and while listening to her voice we can see a haunting compilation of dozens of look-alike female corpses from TV shows like CSI, Hannibal, Twin Peaks, True Detective.
How does this Hollywood fantasy come about?
First of all, filmmakers make sure they choose pretty, white female actors; like bare canvas, bodies are then ready for the make-up phase, which can last even several hours. Make-up professionals turn into real artists in this case: their task is trying to show the unimaginable cruelty and abuse women had to go through and at the same time emphasizing their inherent beauty. Their next step is to place them into the environment that the producer picked while manipulating them into unnatural poses as if they were modelling for a live photo shoot.Here the bodies are displayed for minutes, being thoroughly examined by the detectives,forensic pathologists and the viewers alike. The result is as shocking as much as memorable, and a constitutive part itself of the movie’s success: how to forget the haunting paleness of Laura Palmer in David Lynch’s seminal Twin Peaks?
What Happened to Her, while uncovering the dynamics behind the scenes of many famous TV series, invites us to reflect on the role of women in Hollywood and in society as a whole. The documentary was featured at the 2016 London Feminist Film Festival, where it received its European Premiere, and also at the 2016 Hot Docs Festival where it earned the Honourable Mention Best Short Documentary Category.
Kristy Guevara-Flanagan is an American producer and director who has been focusing extensively on how women are represented the by media.