Adriana Mozzo
On Monday, November 24, our class watched the Dutch film, Necrocam. It was about 4 teenage hacker friends who use technology to confront the mysteries of death.
For the characters in the film, technology is an extension of life. The teens use technology in almost every part of their daily lives. They play computer games, communicate through internet messaging, and record much of their activities with a video camera. So they believed technology should also play a role in death.
It all started with the character Christine who has cancer and believes she is dying. She tells her friends that she wants them to do everything they possibly can to install a webcam that she calls “necrocam”, in her coffin when she dies. On video-camera, the friends pledge an oath (they swear on Bill Gates’ grave) to install the necrocam in the coffin of the first one who dies. Christine later finds out she is entering remission and in a plot twist tragedy strikes when another of the friends, Xeno, is hit by a car and killed. Attempting to honor Xeno’s final wishes, the teens show the videotape of the pact to the victim’s parents. The parents are disgusted with the idea, but the teens go ahead with the plan anyway and dig up the coffin and install the webcam. I think it was interesting to see the parent’s disapproval of the plan as they represented a generation who is still uncomfortable with technology. While the teenagers represent the people who are very intimate with the world of computers and use technology in creative and unconventional ways.
Throughout the semester we have been learning about the hacker culture and their motivations. One common element present in all of the different hackers we have discussed has been a desire to know and understand something completely and spread that knowledge to others. I think the film capture this ambition. The necrocam was an attempt to understand death. The movie ends with internet users viewing Xeno’s dead corpse being eaten away by maggots. The visitors can also vote to adjust the coffin’s temperature. This was Xeno’s idea, before his death, to help understand the decaying process of a dead body. In a sense, this was a way to “hack” death. Changing the temperature allowed users to manipulate the rate at which Xeno’s body would decay. While it was a bit gross, the teens confronted what is often ignored and misunderstood in Western society, death.