Grossest Column Ever

In the 1986 film The Hitcher, Rutger Hauer ties Jennifer Jason Leigh between two semi trucks, then puts one in reverse and rips her in half.

Sometime around 1988 I saw that movie and to this day when I drive past a truckstop my stomach tenses just a bit, as if in that situation I would somehow be able to will my body to stay in one piece. I've actually spent a lot of time speculating on exactly what part of her would have ripped off first. The film masterfully chooses not to show you what happens to Leigh, focusing instead on C. Thomas Howell, who is inside the truck with Hauer at the time attempting to convince him not to do what he's about to do. I suppose the filmmakers want you to picture the corpse with some symmetry, imagining the line of demarcation to be somewhere between the ribs and the pelvis...you know, a proper ripped in half. But as I've gotten older I've started to think it's more likely that her arms tore off.

While not exactly the same thing, I did a quick search on the rack and found this blurb on Wikipedia:

One gruesome aspect of being stretched — deliberately — too far on the rack is the loud popping noises made by snapping cartilage, ligaments or bones. Eventually, if the application of the rack is continued, the victim's limbs are ripped right off.

Of course, now that makes me think, maybe she wasn't ripped in half at all...maybe she was ripped in thirds: arms, legs, torso. That seems pretty bloody likely.

The idea of that moment when a person ceases to be a person and simply becomes flesh has always haunted me, and I think about it way too much. That scene in The Hitcher was horrifying, but I watched the film repeatedly. How exactly did she die, would she have been conscious at all after the truck pulled her apart? Who cleaned her up and how? It's a horrible, disgusting, disturbing train of thought but it's apparently the equivalent of an analytical slip-n-slide for me. I love, love, love to disturb myself with these things.

When I was 19, I had a surgery to correct my Scoliosis; by that time I had a 45° curve and wore baggy clothes all the time so no one would notice. The surgery was called Spinal Fusion with Rods, and it's sort of like the rack for your spinal column. The doctors attach metal rods that extend the length of the curved area and then they tighten them, pulling your spine straight. Once it's straight, they take pieces of bone from another part of your body and pack it in between the affected vertebrae. This ultimately grows into a more solid structure that helps keep the spine straight. Then they sew you back up and you spend the rest of your life setting off metal detectors.

The night before the surgery I practically drove myself to the brink of insanity by imagining my own decomposed body lying in a coffin, rotting away. And I wondered, how long it would be before I would be nothing more than a skeleton and those metal rods. Maybe some day in the future stainless steel will be rare and important, and grave diggers will crack my coffin open and take them.

I should probably be cremated. That would be hilarious. I'll be an urn on someone's shelf with two metal rods sticking out of the top. Maybe they'll scatter my ashes off a cliff or a bridge and the rods will kill something on the way down, and I will toddle off into the oblivion with blood on my hands.

I think what bothered me so much about the surgery was that it was something permanent. It was a permanent change I was making to my body. These things are in there. And unless I go bungee jumping or get the wrong kind of MRI they're going to stay there. It was the first time I really thought of my body and me as finite, something that could truly be damaged.

There's a scene in The Edge, more gruesome than the truck scene in The Hitcher because the director actually shows you what's happening, where Harold Perrineau gets eaten by Bart the Bear. There's a shot where the bear holds him down with one paw and rips at his body with his teeth and just right then, Perrineau stops screaming. You see him stop being a person. He becomes meat. It's one of the few scenes in any movie that I have to not look at. It's too disturbing. Too horrible.

But it happens to be dead on. I think the reason I'm so intrigued by these things is because once I get past the fear of them, once I let go of that clingy need to see myself as something that can transcend damage, I'm less fearful. I become defiant. Han Solo was a badass in his hunk of junk Milennium Falcon, precisely because he knew that ship could take a beating and keep going.

So no, I could not survive being strung up between two trucks moving in opposite directions. And I could not survive being eaten by a bear. But it's the ultimate frailty of this body that makes one strive to be strong. To muscle through as it were and stop worrying about everything. I mean, don't get me wrong, you aren't going to find me hanging around the Catskills waiting for a bear to stroll by just so I can feel truly alive. But I'm thinking that maybe, just maybe, my doctor was wrong about the bungee jumping thing. Maybe those rods wouldn't shoot straight out through my neck and harpoon someone on the ground below.

Of course if that did happen it would be pretty cool, as awful as it would also be. As Queen so aptly put it in their epic soundtrack for the film Highlander, who wants to live forever.