mangiotto's Full Review: Jack Huddleston and Katherine Dunn - Death Scenes:...
There are landmarks in my visceral education as, I am sure, there must be in the lives of any individuals of a certain age. For a lot of people it’s a dead woodchuck, a grandparent “in state” or, like the kids in Stephen King’s novella “The Body,” it’s a corpse undiscovered in the wild – subject to the pernicious effects of flora, fauna, and weather. For me in a childhood (and parts of adulthood) that was largely spent in ensconced cocoons of word and leather-bound parchment, my visceral landmarks are largely, thankfully, merely of the literary variety.
One is a description of the contents of Crouch End w-hore Mary Kelly’s pockets – disclosed in a police report after her unrecognizable remains had been left by Jack the Ripper for a shocked Scotland Yard constabulary to find. A sewing kit, a packet of tea, a little sugar, a toothbrush. Things of such utter banality that they broke my heart by the humanity of them – there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think of the charnel picture of what was left of Mary Kelly with a mental caption running beneath it listing the sum total of this person’s possessions.
Another is a photo document of the atrocities committed by the Japanese during their obliteration of the remaining populace of Nanking during W.W. II. Photographs smuggled out by brave storeowners and missionaries with the intent to preserve in images what words could only partially express.
The first is a humanization of the word “w-hore” and the appellation “last victim of Jack the Ripper” – the other is a document of rage and fear, confirming the essential lowness of humanity in their ability to perpetrate the most shocking of atrocities upon another human being. Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective’s Scrapbook is both.
I’ve often chuckled at the righteousness of television gumshoes in interrogating their charges – “that’s a human life you’ve taken, scumbag” they would say – and I’d roll my eyes in the way a person entirely innocent of the sundry details of a crime scene might roll them. I was smarming from my ivory tower: “c’mon – don’t you know that people are sh!ts?” That’s not realistic, I’d confide, sure that my intellectualized experience was the equal of the angst of a fictional cop’s.
What I didn’t know was that no matter how strange and bitter a person becomes in the duty of law enforcement, that the pure visceral impact of arriving at hotel room recently turned slaughterhouse must, if even only for a moment, always hold the same kind of outrage and sensory offense. In other words, though the defense mechanisms may eventually become honed to an athlete’s edge, it can never get easier to be the first witness to the dread result of man’s inhumanity to man, lest you lose your soul with your humanity entire.
Jack Huddleston was a Homicide cop in L.A. county in the thirties, forties, and fifties – a man that at some point began to compile a scrapbook of crime scene photos, mug shots, and documents of physical deformity and disease that he must have fingered like a teenager fingers his guilty album of beaver shots. Among the dog-eared black and white crime scene photo’s, Huddleston’s gone back and added captions – descriptions of disease, clarifications of motive when they’re available, snide remarks when they’re “appropriate” – the suicides get the bulk of the derision – a hanging victim carries the caption “a little throat trouble” into eternity.
There is a cold fury to this collection of the most explicit kind of pornography, a kind of revenge for Huddleston that trembles and seethes with blame and self-loathing. “You’ve done this to me” – Huddleston’s shade seems to suggest – “and now I’m going to share with you what your bestial nature has inflicted upon my life.” For as indelible as these images must have been for Huddleston, for as much as their siren’s call whispered to him night after night and haunted his waking hours, they are now my burden to carry as well. In a carefully typed justification found tucked in the front cover of the album, Huddleston warns “crime does not pay” before he urges “please handle this book with respect.”
There’s a lot of room for interpretation of these two warnings and in the past hour, I believe that I’ve gone over the bulk of them. Mostly, though, I’ve noticed a tremor in my hand and a lightness in my belly. I don’t think I’m the same person I was yesterday – wiser, maybe – older, definitely.
Featuring an absolutely stunning introduction by Katherine Dunn (Geek Love) that stands as one of the most remarkable critique/editorials that I’ve ever read, Death Scenes is a picture book that is not only a chronicle of death and mayhem, but a surgeon’s scalpel exposing the voyeuristic impulse lurking in the darkest places in all of us. As Dunn reveals in her introduction, “(Huddleston’s) real purpose is to disguise the truth – that he started out terrified and ended up liking it, fascinated, an aficionado.”
It begs the question of why it is that we slow for the stray traffic accident; that we gather in the middle of the street, chittering like ghoulish chattel when an ambulance has stopped in front of a strange neighbor’s home. In my review for Thomas Harris’ Hannibal I refer to it as surviving members of a herd imprinting a hard Technicolor lesson about the perils of living and, to some extent, that innate desire to know the face of death must be related to relief and fascinated revulsion. But isn’t there something more dramatically disordered about our inability to look away? Something more deeply perverse about “reality” based television and the popularity of videos featuring drunken college girls humiliating themselves at Mardis Gras?
The most dangerous pictures in Death Scenes involve the death and suffering of children and infants. There are no wry comments accompanying these scenes – no attempts to defuse the situation or lend an ironic perspective to the loss of tiny lives to violence and neglect. My hand fluttered to my heart when I turned to this section. I stopped browsing for a couple of hours and cried and hugged my wife, but I wouldn’t tell her what was wrong. I’m not certain that I knew.
I’m quite certain that I’ve never reacted that way before to anything in my life.
There are two captions that are memorable in this section – one is a fifteen-year-old’s suicide. He’s propped up against a utility shelf, it looks like he might be in a garage: there are paint cans on the ground next to the youngster’s body. He’s a handsome kid, the pistol responsible for his death lies next to his legs, splayed gracelessly akimbo like a marionette allowed to heap. He’s a handsome kid and Huddleston relates in his scrawled script: “suicide 15 yrs old caused by A BROKEN HOME, AND A BROKEN HEART”
The other is a pair of pictures one from the front showing a beautiful little girl apparently asleep, the other showing the back of her head which, the caption tells us, has been savaged by a dog. There’s a motive. The motive is “jealousy.”
Huddleston, and this is related by Dunn as well in her lengthy introduction, is a man that has seen atrocities beyond imagination and still has the ability to believe that young boys die of broken hearts. Can I take some degree of comfort from a call of hope in the turbulent eye of a spiraling abyss? I can try. Huddleston, though, is also a man that equates the motives for murder for an animal to the motives for murder for an animal in man’s clothing. By the end of his career, I don't believe that Huddleston saw a difference.
The only justifications Huddleston can muster in his continued chronicling and pack-ratting of these scenes of mayhem are the occasional written updates detailing incarceration or execution. I imagine he used this justification in the quiet hours of the morning when he took his collection down from its shelf.
There’s a vicious, murderous cycle described there, somewhere, but I’m not in the mood to engage in a discussion of it.
Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective’s Scrapbook is one of the most deeply disturbing visceral educations that I’ve ever had. It is not for the faint of heart or the weak of gorge – a parade of atrocities and images that will haunt me for all of the rest of my days. I shall never forget the lessons of the book – the blank looks and the body’s secrets displayed gracelessly and with a clinical precision. In my way, I have memorialized the victims’ suffering and indignity by offering them a place in the soft tissues of my brain. If you don’t have a similar space, I wouldn’t suggest that you browse this collection.
Death Scenes is the caliginous art – the logical end to pornography that shows people at their least affected and most casual – the non-postured stills that painters of the last century tried to conjure to uncertain and varying consequence. In a very real way, I’m reminded of the cadavers provided for dissection in a med student’s gross anatomy class – the last remnants of a human being donated for the purposes of education and utterly vulnerable to abuse and marginalization It shouldn’t be this easy to buy this book. It’s a testament to the magnificence and scope of our freedoms that it is – and a test for your restraint to refrain if you don’t feel absolutely certain that you’re up for its confidences. I thought I was macho, dear reader, and Death Scenes laughed in my face.
It’s undeniably powerful. Please handle this book with respect.
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