I’m the first to admit that the funeral customs in the United States are dated and banal events. There are the pomp and circumstance, old testament type funerals that haven’t wavered since whenever. There are also celebrations of life that usually run for two hours of poor planning, garrulous storytelling about the deceased, and music selections that no matter how many times I’ve heard the same songs I still enthusiastically nod and say, ‘wow, that’s a really great song choice.’ Believe me, the Nick Cave version of “Death is Not the End” is played at a lot of funerals.
Not to say I haven’t had my fair share of off funerals. I had a guy knife a chicken through the neck and pour the blood onto the ground around the grave plot. I’ve watched a group of people pile stacks of money into the crematory. And I’ve watched a pack of hippies outfit a dead dog in a coat and crown made of marijuana buds. But even after seeing all of that I still say to myself, “Dammit this funeral needs strippers!” and that is exactly what the documentary, Dancing for the Dead, is about!
Funeral carts have been a part of Taiwan’s history since the late 1800’s. Originally they were just flower carts being dragged behind a coffin, going from temple to temple to pay respects to the mishmash of God’s contrived from the presence of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Christianity in Taiwanese culture.
Over time, the carts became more elaborate and sometime during the 1980’s, of course, strippers started getting integrated into the show. According to a few folks interviewed for the documentary, a very important aspect of the Taiwanese culture is paying respect to the dearly departed. Mourners do this by integrating things into the funeral the corpse liked during life like specific food being eaten at the funeral, placing flasks of booze in the casket, and hiring strippers to dance and sing! What a magical culture! I imagine my body would be lit on fire in a strip club’s parking lot if my wife ever thought I enjoyed strippers.
In Taiwan the consensus is all celebrations must be what they call Mala,which translates to Hot and Noisy. The more hot and noisy the celebration the more successful it is and the happier the Gods are. This becomes a competition of sorts and is taken very serious in neighborhoods. Speaking of Gods, did I tell you how much the Taiwanese love satiating their Gods? They love’em! Especially the lower Gods because lower Gods love to eat, smoke, get drunk, roll dice, and sleep with prostitutes – religion here I come. So how do you appeal to a lower God with the habits of Charles Bukowski so your 91 year old father’s funeral is off the hook? You guessed it.
Strange funeral rituals and customs are usually based on something horrifying. For example the disposition of dissolving people in an alkaline fluid filled pressure cooker until their body is soft enough to go down a drain into the water system and their bones are left to be pulverized into tiny chunks and put into an urn– wait, that’s the United States and it’s called Alkaline Hydrolysis.
Watching Dancing for the Dead and learning about Electric Funeral Carts is like a breath of fresh air for this Mortician because for once a funeral is literally a hot, loud, sexually charged party as opposed to black clouds and frowny faces or skinning corpses, killing the wife of the deceased so he won’t be lonely in heaven, and smashing the body apart with rocks on top of a mountain so birds can bring their spirit to heaven.
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