Abstrakt
In the first part of the work the authors will trail the evolution of motive of death in pop culture of 20. century, the image of death, and the process of coping with it. Inhuman, monsters, zombies or skeleton with scythe are basically all the same: the embodiment of our fear of death.
From the Middle Age, when death was part of everyday life, the feeling about death has completely changed. Death is out of our lives, but the fear did not disappear and became even stronger.
Death and destruction came back to us in form of dehumanization: in form of non-humans, who want to kill us. But we show our domination over them in two ways: in form and content, in "safe" products of pop culture, in which we always defeat non-human with help of technology and science - ours inventions.
The authors will describe the most frequent images and function of death in contemporary pop culture, artworks and movies.The second part of this paper deals with relationship between representation of "inhuman" and the Czechoslovak eighties' society. We can see - in a television and movie production of Czechoslovak eighties - images of decadence, asymmetry and chaos.
It seems that the film-makers are inspired by Kafka's images of evil (The Metamorphosis, 1915) and develop the theme of "insects and bugs" in a world of late "normalization". Insect is a main anti-hero (from "weird fiction" Monstrum z galaxie Arkana, Gosti iz galaksije, 1981; ideological series 30 případů majora Zemana, 30 Cases of Mayor Zeman, 1978; to social-critique movies Pavučina, Cobweb, 1986; Mravenci nesou smrt, Ants Carry the Death, 1985).
Insect (and other weird creatures - e.g. vampire-car in Upír z Feratu, Ferat Vampire, 1981) implicitly represents the danger that destroys the socialist society from inside (dangers of drugs, consumerism and Occidental society in general). Our goal is to show that these images of "inhuman" also represent something else: fear of a socialist society that knew communism is about to end.