Parabolic Fear Appeals, Culturally Responsible Messaging about HIV/AIDS, and the Metaphor of the Grim Reaper

Defining Hidden Public Health Risk in the Grim Reaper PSA

By way of its open-ended metaphor, the Grim Reaper ad teaches a simple lesson to its audience. The narrator of the PSA says: “At first, only gays and IV drug users were being killed by AIDS, but now we know every one of us can be devastated by it” (NACAIDS, 00:11-00:20, 1987), just before a massive bowling ball thrown by the Grim Reaper pummels a group containing women and children. In this moment, the narrator distinguishes between the “innocent” victims of AIDS and the “non-innocent” victims. As seen in the direct quote above, the language being used divides the people of Australia into groups; one group of gay men and IV drug users, and now the group of “us” (00:19)—everyone else. The audience is led to understand that the cluster of people being targeted by the Reaper and the bowling ball is “us.” The first group, then, can easily be placed into the vehicle of the murderous Grim Reaper by a misguided audience. In doing this, the ad inadvertently teaches a moral. Although the original intention was just to play off of moral panic to motivate public health arguments, a different discourse was created. If you participate in “immoral” activities (such as unprotected sex or drug use), you are a threat to the innocent people around you. This moral is aided by the religious connotations of the Reaper.

According to Jakobsen and Pellegrini, this was not an uncommon theme in early AIDS reporting. The main question being asked was: “Is AIDS a threat to the general public?” In this context, who is the general public? This remains a meaningful question because the general public does not include everyone (Jakobsen & Pellegrini, 2003, p. 51). By making this distinction, those not included in the general public become the other, the monster (Lupton, 1993, p. 324). A story that set out to vilify a pathogen actually emerges as a story that disparages the lifestyle choices of groups mentioned by name within the first ten seconds of the ad. Naturally, this othering also further strengthens hegemony by making heterosexuality out to be the acceptable norm when the public is still trying to unlearn GRID (Gay Related Immune Disease) and understand AIDS (Vitellone, 2001, p. 38). The way metaphor is used in the video also affects the tone, which in turn affects the onlooking public.

The metaphor of the Grim Reaper is muddled and permeated with the cultural values of the viewer. Before the ad aired, there were many misconceptions floating around the public consciousness about what AIDS was, who was at risk, (as well as who posed the risk), and why those specific groups were being affected (Stylianou, 2010, p. 11). The problem with risk, as Lupton describes it, is that too much emphasis is placed on personal responsibility. A person’s risk level, if high, is due to their own moral failings and weaknesses (Lupton, 1993, p. 429). The ad shows the Reapers actively and offensively attacking the heterosexual adults and children. Not only are homosexuals being punished, but they are now also distributing punishment on the unsuspecting public. It is here that the non-heteronormative person is “virologized.” The message being sent is that their “immoral” lifestyles and actions now have external consequences that can be willfully exacted on everyone else. This metaphor turns the gay man into “an impossible object, a monster” (Watney, 1987, p. 77). That fear, in a tumultuous time like the 1980s, can be misguided when unchecked. Into the early 1990s, homophobia and HIV-related discrimination had been “pervasive and extensive” in Australia (Van de Ven et al., 1997, p.143). A problematic story emerges here: An attempt to keep people informed about a deadly virus inadvertently made gay persons out to be living instantiations of death. Due to an extant fear of homosexuals, the Reaper became the new face of that panic and, for the viewers, served as a metaphoric representation of their confusion and angst, which created a new parable.

When a parable teaches a lesson to an audience, it also forces that audience to make a judgment about the players in the story. Take for example, the werewolf. This creature has been a staple of twentieth century horror films as well as early European literature; these examples can also be viewed as parables. Stories about this monster capitalize on an audience’s fear of a wolf in sheep’s clothing and teach a lesson about trust. The werewolf looks just like everyone else in its human form but holds a hidden secret underneath. This is why the werewolf can be more deeply analyzed through the lens of queer allegory (Bernhardt-House, 2016, p. 159). Similar to the Grim Reaper from the ad, there is one creature that is different from all of the other characters in the story. This character that is different is also the one causing harm. An initial assessment of this would be that differences—those that need to be hidden—cause harm. In the context of the ad, viewers already primed to view homosexual men as different, but they are also further encouraged to see a figure that is different from everyone else. This view makes that figure frightening and violent. The gay man transforms into the Grim Reaper, just as a villager transforms into a werewolf under the full moon. The ad fictively attaches the feelings people associate with death to homosexuals, therefore teaching the audience to be afraid of the gay community.

With the Grim Reaper comes the dark and smoky background seen throughout the video. It paints a very frightening and exaggerated picture of what was happening at that time in Australia. By using this specific metaphor and imagery, it not only reminds viewers of the problem, but forces this image it into the memories of every audience member. The black and smokey atmosphere also sends a message to the audience. Light and dark have always been juxtaposed as good and evil, respectively. In fact, in many media portrayals, heaven is sunny and bright, while darkness is reserved for guilt and malevolence (Banerjee et al., 2011, p. 407). It seems as if this is the home of the Grim Reapers, and they have dragged their victims down to be killed. The audience is shown that this is where Australia is heading, and exactly who is bringing them there. One of the final shots features many Grim Reapers throwing bowling balls down many lanes. This was done to show just how many people are dying of AIDS in the country, but something else is happening in the mind of the viewer. Not only does this go against the traditional presentation of the Grim Reaper in most cultures as a solitary figure, but this also makes it easier for an audience to place a specific group of people in the tenor of the metaphor. The audience gets the idea that the moral degeneracy associated with homosexuality is spreading, not the disease.

The Grim Reaper, being one of the most widely recognized symbols of death, proves to be a good metaphor for AIDS because the disease was considered a death sentence at the time. By comparing AIDS to the Grim Reaper, the deadliness of the disease is brought to the public’s attention. This is one of the ad’s strengths, but there are also weaknesses that take away from its effectiveness. The interactions of the multifaceted array of metaphors in the PSA, not only perpetuated, but also reified homophobic sentiments. Ceccarelli discusses the problems that arise when audiences interact with mixed metaphors:

The entailments of metaphors often differ from what we explicitly claim that we are trying to convey, reflecting instead the language that has been used most frequently in the past or a cultural perception of the science and of our proper relationship to it. (Ceccarelli, 2004, p. 104)

Interpretation can be a strong tool for allowing an audience to connect with an idea, but that connection will not always align with the creator’s intentions. This is especially true in cases of resistive reading. A resistive read of the Reaper helped to maintain problematic ideologies that oppressed an already marginalized group (Ceccarelli, 2009, p. 409). In this case, polysemy does not always give power to the audience. Along with what seems to be the intentional meaning of the campaign are other meanings, especially the stereotyping of the homosexual man as a danger to Australian society. Certain aspects of the metaphor are what allowed for this kind of interpretation to run rampant with viewers.

The Grim Reaper is a human-shaped, living being. When audiences watched the beings directly murder innocent Australians in the ad, it brought about a need for interpretation. The Reaper, then, is a hollow shell that encourages a sort of aimless fear, inviting the audience to insert their own fears. Also hidden in that hollow shell is many different collapsed meanings. Within the ad’s depiction of the Reaper is not only what the creators wanted the audience to see, but also what the audience themselves were predisposed to see based on their prior understandings of AIDS. In addition, this version of the Grim Reaper strays away from what the symbolic figure has represented for most of history. The skeletal figure has been portrayed thousands of different ways by hundreds of different cultures. In the Christian Bible, the Grim Reaper—or the Angel of Death—is God’s messenger, merely reaping souls and passing no judgment upon them. However, it has also appeared as a dancer, a judge, a bailiff, a grave digger, a gardener, and other depictions across diverse cultural texts (Guthke, 1999, p. 11). In the ad, the many Grim Reapers stray away from the Biblical vision of the Angel of Death. They do no reaping, but instead do the killing themselves. This strips them of the “Reaper” title, completely changing the meaning of the symbolism. In the ad, it seems like they are the ones making the judgment of who lives and who dies. This makes for a confusing metaphor that a Western audience can misinterpret. They see a malicious enemy acting as the judge, jury, and executioner, when in reality a virus cannot act maliciously or with calculation. Therefore, a human entity needs to be attached for the idea to click in the viewers’ mind.