The Man Gaddafi a Gore in Life as in Death

   The dead tyrant's corpse tests what we make of death.

Christ – and his opposite? (Top, Kunstmuseum Basel; bottom, Manu Brabo/AP Photo)

Muammar Gaddafi in death, below Hans Holbein The Younger's great "Dead Christ," in the Basel Kunstmuseum.

Images of Muammar Gaddafi, taken Thursday as he was battered and bleeding and then dead, are everywhere, and everyone should find them hard to look at. They operate as war porn and gore porn, not much different from the ton of less newsworthy carnage that floats free in cyberspace, and that probably shouldn’t. But we still need to look at the Gaddafi shots, I think, because pornography is only part of their story.  To my Christian-trained eyes, there’s huge pathos in these images, regardless of the monster they show. Since the Middle Ages at least, Western image-making has had the sight of greatness, cast down and bloodied, right at its heart. Before any war was caught in pictures, before any artist had even painted a subject from life, Europeans already had images of a great figure – the Christ himself, King of Kings and God of Gods, as Handel has us sing in Messiah – tortured and strung up and then finally slaughtered. It goes without saying that Gaddafi himself was perfectly evil and un-Christ-like. Anyone who believes in hell imagines him there now. But our Western eyes aren’t as smart as our morals: They see those photos of Gaddafi, alive and suffering and then as a blasted corpse, and head straight to the crucifixion scenes that are the bedrock of our visual culture. Some Christians would say that this is one of the gifts that their religion and its art give them: That they can understand the suffering of Christ as standing for the suffering that anyone else could ever endure. Even in the case of someone as evil as Gaddafi, say Christians, we profit from being able to see a piece of suffering humanity in him, because what he’s enduring was also endured by God’s son. I’m the most convinced of atheists, but I like to think that the Christian images I’ve been immersed in help me see the tortured man in pictures of a monster dying. When U.S. officials went to such lengths not to release any pictures of the corpse of Osama bin Laden, even though that might have helped prove his death, its wasn’t just that they didn’t want his supporters to have the chance to present him as a martyr, although that’s what everyone said at the time. Our officials also may have hidden Osama's corpse from our sight because they didn’t want our eyes to spot even a little bit of ourselves – or of the Christ who’s meant to stand for us all – in his damaged body.  

But looking hard at the Gaddafi photos shows that they also allow a totally different, less familiar reading that may justify their taking, and their circulation. They show Gaddafi as damaged goods, as worthless carion, as trash. Which means that they accurately reveal, you could say, the repugnant reality that was always there under the grand surface Gaddafi liked to present to the world. With Gaddafi, the contrast isn’t just between a live guy in a dull suit and his equally dull-looking corpse, as we get with images of slaughtered Western tyrants such as Mussolini or Ceausescu.  Gaddafi liked to present himself as splendid and regal; he often dressed in shades of gold, like the uniform he was wearing when he died, because he wanted to be seen as inherently precious.  The greatness that he claimed wasn’t really built on particular actions and their positive results for his people. (As time passed, it got harder and harder to claim such results, even for an inveterate liar like Gaddafi.) This leader’s greatness was built on the idea that he, in his person, was greatness incarnate.  That’s why that person had to be destroyed, smashed, made worthless and ugly, and then recorded in that state. If there was magic – successful magic, I think – in Gaddafi as gilded idol, then there’s an equal and opposite magic in images of Gaddafi as a stomach-turning mess.

From the bit that I know about Islamic art and culture, it seems that there's a history of great sensitivity to the abject and repugnant. (I just consulted Michael Barry, the great Islamic scholar at Princeton, and he cited several examples of outrageous desecration of corpses in the history of some Muslim – or at least Sunni – societies, so I hope I'm on to something.) The art of the Islamic world has, by and large, been about evident and visible perfection ­– an artistic perfection that mirrors the absolute perfection attributed to God. Mosques are built to be pristine and shining; worshippers who venture into them to pray need to wash first to match the site and their deity’s purity.  So the opposite of such perfection – a disgusting corpse, a “dirty” dog, even the bottom of a shoe – has a very different valence than it ever could in European culture, bathed in images of the battered Son of God.

By showing Gaddafi as a sickening mess, his enemies established his absolute distance from everything good.

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