Saw the photo. A row of leaders, phones up, faces slack. The coffin — Pope Francis’s coffin — plain and weighty, firm in the foreground. Some of them are turned toward it — Trump, for one — but even then the expressions are blank, detached, the faces of people witnessing not death but an event already sliding into image. They’re not looking at the coffin, not really. They’re looking at their screens, at the thing they are producing. Mourning replaced by recording. Presence hollowed out.
Debord again, never far away: “everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” But it’s worse now, more total. They aren’t even pretending to be present anymore. Just there to prove they were there. The death itself — the fact of it — secondary to the production of an image of death. Documentation has swallowed experience whole.
Baudrillard would say we’re beyond representation now. This isn’t an image of mourning; it’s an image instead of mourning. No real loss, no real grief, just signs piling up on signs, each one emptier than the last. The funeral isn’t the thing. The photograph of the funeral is the thing. The photograph of the photograph of the funeral is the thing. On and on until there’s nothing left but noise.
Even the ones with heads bowed — no phones in their hands — can’t escape it. Their refusal becomes another image, another posture. There’s no way out. Authenticity is just another content stream. A bowed head is only another kind of brand.
We used to carry our dead through the streets. Public grief, shared, uncommodified. Now we turn them into content before the earth’s even taken them. A Pope dies and the first instinct is to frame it, catch it, store it away like a dead butterfly pinned under glass.
The coffin remains, solid and unmoving, the last real thing in the frame. Around it, the churn of spectacle whirls and empties itself out. A box carrying not a life, but the memory of one — and already half-forgotten.
It’s not just the death of a man. It’s the death of the possibility of real mourning. Real attention. Real anything.
Maybe we stopped believing in death the moment we stopped believing in life.
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