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Contents
The Grim Reaper Campaign and its Unruly Metaphor
HIV/AIDS: Perceptions and Policy in the 1980s
Defining Hidden Public Health Risk in the Grim Reaper PSA
Introduction
The Grim Reaper, the ominous, cloak-adorning, scythe-wielding figure has a long history beginning in the Hebrew Bible (Guthke, 1999, p. 11) and consistently appears in religious and philosophical texts. This association of the figure of the Grim Reaper with religious discourses can be found in more recent historical texts as well. The Circle of Human Life, for instance, first published in 1841, is a theological treatise that mentions the Reaper. From this writing, the reader learns that the Grim Reaper appears at the moment of death, although not to judge one’s soul. It does not decide whether that soul goes to heaven or hell; its presence merely designates that one’s soul is bound for judgment by God (Tholuck, 1841, p. 11). The Grim Reaper, then, is inherently a theological figure, entwined with the notion of religious judgment.
Fast forward almost two hundred years to 1987, when the familiar skeletal figure bowled its way onto Australian television screens in the now infamous Grim Reaper AIDS PSA. The ad depicts the Reaper (a metaphorical representation of the AIDS virus) throwing giant bowling balls at innocent Australian children and adults, effectively using them as bowling pins. While the PSA was effective in getting Australians to get tested for HIV (Stylianou, 2010, pp. 11-12), the metaphor was not without its problems. For example, as David Menadue, an author that tested positive for HIV in 1984, has said with respect to the ad: “At the time, it was incredibly scary, particularly for positive people. Like, we felt we were the Grim Reaper bowling the balls and that poor little girl in the pigtails, in many ways, was not the real target of the campaign” (Cited in Padula, 2006, p. 4). Though the PSA did not intend to invoke this meaning, the metaphor of the Reaper came loaded with religious associations that nonetheless enabled otherizing discourses.
Here, I argue that the Grim Reaper PSA uses a parabolic fear appeal, a fear appeal that plays off a specific parable, or a story that includes an extended metaphor (Coats, 1981, p. 370). Parables use “the moral of the fable as a point of provoking judgement [sic] ... The point of the storytelling process is to elicit judgment from the audience” (p. 377). In this essay, I will briefly review the literature on metaphor, distinguishing parabolic fear appeal from other sorts of metaphors in the context of public health and HIV/AIDS in the 1980s. Following this, I will carry out an analysis informed by parabolic fear appeals that demonstrates how the ad worked to frighten people, but not simply by expressing the threat of HIV as a pathogen. By applying a theological figure to HIV/AIDS, the ad also resonated with conservative discourses, encouraging the conflation of homophobic sentiments with evaluations of public health risk.