The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture

In this book, Khapaeva discusses the cultural change in celebrating and commodifying death and death-based aesthetics, such as vampirism and Halloween. She compares reception of these topics in America and Russia, using references and media from both as supplements to her point. While I disagree with the notion of humanity being inherently death-denying, a lot of her points had merit. Her view on humanism and how nonhuman entities reject human exceptionalism was interesting, as is the idea that this led to dehumanization and desensitization of human death.

However, I quickly lost interest when she began analyzing Harry Potter and its impact. While I can't doubt its cultural impact, I believe Khapaeva did a poor job at communicating its relevancy. Particularly troubling was the demonization of mental illnesses — specifically, the labelling of Harry as a “deranged maniac” after explaining his psychotic symptoms. Khapaeva argues that the demonization of these psychotic symptoms in “wizard culture” in the series means that it can't serve as a therapeutic tool in reality, which completely misses the idea that children seeing a protagonist be famed as a hero while still struggling with psychotic symptoms could be comforting. On a smaller scale, the usage of the outdated “multiple personality disorder” instead of “dissociative identity disorder” was telling. Generally, I thought this portion delving into Harry Potter's mental state was unnecessary and in poor taste, especially because the series should have been brought up solely due to its themes of death and how it affects humanism and human exceptionalism.

The beginning part is strong, and still has important information that I enjoyed reading through, but the section about Harry Potter should have been shorter than it is. Most of the information there was irrelevant at best and damaging at worst.