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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
Interpreting Fear
Fear appeals are ubiquitous in public health messaging and have shown to be effective time and time again. In fact, studies have shown that the stronger the fear invoked, the more persuasive the message (Witte & Allen, 2000, p. 601). With particular concern for the Grim Reaper ad, the power of its fear appeal can be explained by deterrence theory. This theory posits that people will act a certain way as long as the benefits outweigh the risks. That is, undesirable behaviors can be halted if the person is made aware of the severe consequences of those behaviors (Johnston, Warkentin, & Siponen, 2015, pp. 118-119). In the ad, the audience is warned that if they practice unhealthy habits and avoid getting tested, they will be visited by the Grim Reaper, or worse, prostrated by a giant bowling ball. Lupton, in explaining communication of health risk, states that, “approaches to health risk focus upon risk as a consequence of the ‘lifestyle’ choices made by individuals, and thus place the emphasis upon self-control” (Lupton, 1993, p. 427). External risk has been used by public health communicators to place certain people in the categories of “those at risk” or “those posing a risk.” In doing this, risk can be used similarly to “sin” as a way to “moralize and politicize dangers” (p. 428). Therefore, risk is a “hegemonic conceptual tool” that is capable of reinforcing problems already plaguing marginalized groups (p. 432). It is for this reason that communicators must be responsible with their use of fear.
Further, when used in media, ideas are often “collapsed,” meaning that when one idea is being presented on screen, there are still many other ideas being referenced simultaneously. This is how cultural meaning are shared with the audience (Altheide, 1997, p. 661). By utilizing media, a message will be spread far and wide, placing itself at the mercy of interpretation: “With dissemination, meaning explodes” (Ceccarelli, 2009, p. 398). From this idea, we gain the term polysemy, which is defined as “the existence of determinate but nonsingular denotational meanings” (p. 399). One type of polysemy, called resistive reading, gives power to an audience when they “develop a contrary understanding of the text’s meaning… In these cases, the producer no longer has control over the denotational meaning of the message” (p. 400). While able to give power to viewers by making them more informed on how to protect themselves from the AIDS virus, the Grim Reaper stripped power from others by being too ambiguous, and thus allowing viewers to draw the wrong conclusion from it. The Grim Reaper is a visual metaphor, which allows for a collapsing of the idea of HIV, risk, and moral assessment into a single metaphor. While this was not the intention of the creators, the over-the-top imagery morphed the fear appeal of the PSA into a parabolic (morally narrativized) fear appeal, which amplified responses of blame, distrust, and misinformation in HIV/AIDS discourses. All of this, coupled with the features of the Grim Reaper PSA, comes together to create an extended metaphor that unlocks parable(s) that undermine public health in culturally problematic ways.