Following Death: Suicide as Tourist Attraction through Popular Culture

Abstract

Although it can be found early forms of touristic activities related to death in the Roman gladiatorial games or the medieval public executions (Stone and Sharpley, 2008), the academic interest for this phenomenon began barely twenty years ago (Light, 2017), especially when Foley and Lennon (1996) talk about “dark tourism” and Seaton (1996) about “thanatourism”. One of the possibilities within this dark tourism is to visit locations where deaths have occurred either by murder or by suicide, main object of this study. There are some iconic places around the world that have been considered as devoted spaces for those determined to end their own lives, such as Aokigahara forest (Japan) or Beachy Head (England). The first one, described as one of the places in the world with the highest number of suicides besides Golden Gate and Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, it is a scenario typically associated to the popular culture. Specifically, the novel Tower of Wave (Nami no Tou, Seicho Matsumoto, 1960) has been blamed for encouraging suicide by giving a romantic view of this enclave (Takahashi, 1988, Bloomfield, 2018). Likewise, The Forest movie (Jason Zada, 2016) or the documentary series Dark Tourist (Netflix, 2018) are recent examples of productions that, although warn of the dangers of visiting this place, reflect that enigmatic atmosphere that attracts tourism. In the case of Beachy Head, movies such as Quadrophenia (Franc Roddam, 1979), novels like The Finkler Question (Howard Jacobson, 2010), the Black Mirror series’ episode "Be Right Back" (Channel 4, Netflix, 2011) or the homonymous songs by Iona or Veronica Falls include explicit references. In fact, these scenarios appear also in travel guides associated with suicide. This is the case of the Viaducto of Segovia in Madrid (Spain), recurrent in several films by Pedro Almodóvar. The main objective of this study is to analyze the image that is given of these suicide spaces in songs, movies, television series, videogames or novels susceptible of becoming tourist claims. Considering that committing suicide is one of the most common causes of death that unfortunately continues to grow (more than 800,000 people every year according to the WHO), it is interesting to check if popular culture is fostering an attractive, exotic or even morbid representation of these dark places.