Max "Bunny" Sparber

NOT MUCH OF THE MEDIEVAL MINDSET remains with us. Contemporary drama, as an example, doesn't reflect the strange Middle Ages ideas of time and space, in which everything seems to be happening simultaneously and right next to each other, making it possible for 14th century English peasants to suddenly find themselves at the birth of Jesus, as happened in Mystery Plays. (It should be noted, though, that the terrific Hungarian film Büvös vadász, or Magic Hunter, allows for this: In one scene, a Medieval rabbit, chased by hunting dogs, leaps into a picture of the Virgin Mary only to emerge in contemporary times).

The idea that kings are the elect of God hasn't stuck, although the undemocratic and dynastic president the United States currently has seemingly believes otherwise. There isn't much discussion anymore of the "abominable fancy," the medieval idea that part of the pleasure of being in heaven will come from witnessing the torments of the damned (although the Left Behind series of books, which reeks of end-time schadenfreude, comes close.)

However, one medieval image remains with us, making infrequent appearance in popular culture, of all places. We still dance the Totentanz, also known as the Danse Macabre.

To the medieval artist, the spectre of death was always about -- especially at the time of the Black Plague, which killed about a third of all Europeans, and was followed by a succession of additional, albeit lesser known, plagues. There was, for example, the Italian Plague of 1629, the Great Plague of London in 1665, and the Great Plague of Vienna in 1679. Collectively, more than 35 million people died.

So the artists in the Middle Ages took the concept of Memento mori -- remembering your own mortality -- and literalized it. They illustrated a seemingly endless series of images in which the living were surrounded by beckoning skeletons, sometimes leading them in a dance to their own graves.

We're still dancing to our burial plots, for whatever reason. Ingmar Bergman had death lead his characters in a dance in The Seventh Seal, set in the Medieval period but lensed in 1957; Woody Allen later satirized this image in his Bergman pastiche Love and Death. The dead of the 20th century dance in the moody 1962 film Carnival of Souls, spinning nightmarishly fast circles around an abandoned Utah pavilion, calling to a living woman to join them. And the dead dance in Tim Burton's films -- most recently in The Corpse Bride, but jaunty, jigging corpses are a recurring motif in his work.

The Revels scored a minor hit in 1959 with a rhythm and blues version of a Totentanz, titled "Midnight Stroll." In fact, the song was originally titled "Dead Man's Stroll," which is a near-literal translation of Danse Macabre, if you remember that the stroll was a popular dance of the 50s. The title was reportedly revised after complaints, but the content of the song remains untouched, and it might as well simply be a description of a Medieval Memento mori illustration. Over a sharp, funereal drum percussion and echoing church bells, the Revels sing a repetitive, mournful descending motive, telling of witnessing a top hatted corpse pull himself out of his grave and shimmying down the street. By the end of the song, as is the tradition with the Danse Macabre, our narrator discovers the he has also joined in the dance, presumably headed toward his own coffin.

The song has no proper middle-eighth section, but includes a terrific break. A saxophone picks up the song's lolling riff, and one of the singers cackles wildly over the top of it. The laugh is maniacal, but merry. One imagines that this is the laugh of death itself, leading the midnight stroll, just as endless rows of laughing Medieval skeletons led previous processions of dying men and women on their inevitable dances to the cemetery.

LISTEN TO "DEAD MAN'S STROLL":



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