Since we've begun discussing dismemberment, it seems that I can't go two days without witnessing the loss of a body part. Yesterday, I averted my eyes while a serial killer in the HBO-produced mini-series Epitafios claimed his latest victim by engineering a pully system which allowed him to measure the weight required to rip a toe off of a foot. Bruno, the Argentinian psychopath, also enjoys a good decapitation and seems to have a fondness for fingers so I have no doubts that the body-part count will continue to rise.

Unlike so many horror films where the severing of limbs simply adds to the expected gore, in the noir crime thriller Epitafios, dismemberment resonates on a thematic level. The series begins five years after the incineration of 4 high school students who had been held hostage by an angry science teacher as the result of a miscalculation on the part of a hotshot detective, Renzo. With the removal of each arm, finger, head and toe, the serial killer reminds the police of the loss that he has suffered and that all implicated in the students' death have and will suffer. The wholeness that one feels when in the throes of a successful career or romantic love can be literally figuratively torn away with the toss of a match.

When woven into noir, dismemberment can do more than shock us. It shows us that feelings of wholeness that we imagine are ephemeral and precarious. That which seems to make us feel whole--a lover, a child, a limb, a talent--can be torn from us at any moment. When faced with loss, we can choose, like Renzo, to despair. We can choose to find something or someone else that can make us whole as Laura, a pyschologist implicated in the students deaths does when she marries and has a child. We can choose, like the serial killer, to reenact the moment of loss again and again with the hope of achieving control.

Each time that the killer adds to his collection of fingers, Renzo is pulled farther out of his depression. His search for the psychopath forces him to reconnect with his passion and his need for wholeness which is part of the killer's plan to make Renzo suffer. (You can't take away something from someone who has nothing to lose)
Just as he engineereed the toe removal system, he is setting Renzo up for pain.

I look forward to seeing how the story of loss plays out in Epitafios. My hope is that it shows the killer and the audience that it is the search for knowledge which energizes us rather than the object of that search.