Death and Nativity

Before I left, every book I could find said that Mexicans were obsessed with death. Octavio Paz, in his lucid prose, tells us:

The word death is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the lips. The Mexican, in contrast, is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love.

Is this true? I don’t know. Maybe we are all obsessed with death. I understand there is a long tradition for travel writers to frame their journeys as quests to overcome the fear of death, and I shall do my best to follow their example at appropriate points in the present narrative. The first day I was in Mexico, a VH1 equivalent played the song "Chronicles of Life and Death" by Good Charlotte. The main point of the song, or really its only point, is that what we choose to do with our lives doesn’t matter very much since we are all going to end up dead. The song itself makes no impression, but I must give props to the music video: An old man, lying in a hospital bed, watches his life play out on a TV screen. An android made out of rusted metal, whose name, one can assume, is Death, and who looks like the Tin Woodman at age 94, accompanies him on bike rides when he is a boy, stands in the margins of all his family pictures after he is married with children, and, finally, pushes his wheelchair when he is old. The insight of the video is in its modern incarnation of the grim reaper as a robot: A hooded man with a scythe may fail to move us these days, but what we’re really afraid of is getting eaten by the dishwasher.

On bus rides across the country, I saw a number of dubbed American movies. Most of them happened to be about death. First up was M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, a film with generous amounts of time devoted to people weeping over coffins. Then there was an indie, I think called Wake, about the hilarious disagreements and misunderstandings that develop when relatives gather for a funeral. Later, I caught a movie whose title I can, for the life of me, neither remember nor locate online, but it tells the story of well-meaning teenagers living in what appears to be rural Idaho. They spend their summers playing in the woods and building forts by the river, which is exactly what I did all day when I was 17 and probably what you did as well. As the wheels of the plot are set in motion, somebody apparently dies, until it is discovered that this person is not really dead, but the practical difficulty of admitting this error to the sheriff prompts one person to run off into the forest and another to murder the person who everyone assumed was dead already, and those who are still alive at the end learn the whole experience was just part of growing up. The film makes the common mistake of inserting melodrama into a perfectly acceptable, if idyllic portrait of small-town life, as if it wasn’t enough for us to watch eccentric old men playing dominoes and shy kids falling in love.

If I have proven anything, it’s that popular culture in the United States often betrays an obsession with death. In Mexico, I did find examples of a more hopeful idiom in all of the nativity scenes. These were everywhere – in plazas, museums, hotel lobbies – each of them using their own costumes and props to embellish the original biblical template.

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