Repulsed and fascinated by death, Americans struggle to grasp its physical, psychological and social impact through both a medical understanding of bodily degenerative processes and philosophical and cathartic explorations of its meaning.

Americans avoid the signs of death, age and disease through their love of youth culture, “fitness” and plastic surgery. Biotechnical innovations, cryogenics, genome mapping and cloning have become a new religion that allows Americans to entertain fantasies of immortality Old age and death are profoundly medicalized; age is a medical “problem,” death is a biotechnological failure to preserve life. The other sign of death, disease, is exemplified by the AIDS epidemic. Without cure, AIDS is death; the ultimate eros/thanatos combination where physical pleasures evoke necrophilia. But death is sometimes better than debilitation, a key debate when considering the euthanasia practices of “Dr Death,” Jack Kevorkian.

Most Americans will die in hospitals or nursing homes; dying, grieving and disposing of the dead are hidden and institutionalized events, sanitized processes managed by specialized workers. Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death (1963) pinpointed the exploitative practices of funeral professionals as they dispose of the dead at high costs to the bereaved. Mitford’s work was revelatory but American funerals are still cherished, expensive and necessary rituals.

Death anxiety is expressed in American media culture where mass deaths, at home or afar, are a spectacle. National news coverage and photos of the fiery death of David Koresh and Branch Davidian followers in Waco, Texas, are rivaled only by details and images of murders shown nightly on local television news. The extermination of populations in Cambodia, Rwanda and Yugoslavia, international airplane crashes and earthquake and flood disaster sites are common foci of American media interest, as the fascination with these images competes with discourses of prevention and aid.

Films like Death Becomes Her (1992) explore and parody dreams of youth and immortality alongside tabloid celebrations of serial murders and blockbusters advertising mass death and destruction. Death is evil and asocial, an offense to American sensibilities in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), which display death for voyeurism, moralizing and catharsis within the “exotic” realm of war.

The Faces of Death (1978–91) series and “real” underground images of death in “snuff films” emphasize the precarious pleasures of exploring death anxiety in a society often so intent on containing and obfuscating it.

Death images of Marilyn Monroe, John F. Kennedy Elvis Presley and Princess Diana regularly circulate through tabloid news and Internet sites, the bizarre circumstances of their unexpected deaths meticulously reviewed. As public domain, celebrity deaths exacerbate American death anxiety.

In the end, despite its grotesque finery death in contemporary America remains what it always has been—a primitive finality inseparable from rituals and representations designed to draw meaning from its summons. As each national holiday is marked by a ritualistic recitation of highway and alcohol-related death statistics, death is implicit to American life, an anxiety embedded deeply within the American psyche and cultural practices.