‘Death. Carnage. Chaos’: Mortality and Mountaineering On-screen, and on the Roof of the World

The concept of the ‘difficult dead’ (Spokes et al., Death, Memorialization and Deviant Spaces. Emerald: Bingley, 2018) has previously been applied to those whose death is problematic, or those whose actions in life make their death, and disposal, problematic (Robins and Smith, Mortality 26 (1): 100–111, 2021). Adapting the idea of ‘difficult’ in the context of leisure, this paper uses extreme mountaineering on Mt. Everest as a case study. Following some situating typology around types of risk and mountaineering, the paper compares popular culture depictions of mountaineering on Everest—with a focus on the film Everest (2015) as well as journalistic accounts such as Krakauer’s Into Thin Air (1999)—with contemporaneous research conducted with climbers (e.g., Miller and Mair, Tourism Geographies 22 (2): 354–369, 2020; Mu and Nepal, Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research 21 (5): 500–511, 2016) towards an understanding of the relationship between representation and reality. How might the difficult dead trouble binary distinctions be found in popular accounts and in the stories of climbers? And how might the cognate concept of provocative morbid space (Penfold-Mounce, Death, the Dead and Popular Culture. Emerald: Bingley, 2018) help us understand the liminal and troubling nature of bodies left behind on the roof of the world? The paper closes by framing these debates in the context of gender and class in particular.