Stay Hot or Rot Trying: The Necropolitics of “Death Becomes Her”

Photo via Washington City Paper

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Hollywood has always marketed beauty as a form of citizenship to the industry and society as a whole. You may pay taxes and obey laws, but only some bodies are granted cultural legitimacy. In the film “Death Becomes Her,” directed by Robert Zemeckis, the fantasy of eternal youth appears as a mystical joke, yet the joke holds truth: America has long treated aging as a policy failure rather than a natural condition. The film’s camp absurdity reads today like early political theory on an emerging longevity biotech economy and its promise that mortality itself may soon be up for purchase.

Released in 1992, at the tail end of the Reagan-era luxury economy, the film plays like satire disguised as slapstick comedy. Madeline Ashton and Helen Sharp, portrayed by Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn, claw towards agelessness not because they desire self-actualization but because the social architecture around them demands it—whether that be to maintain the image of a seductress or get back at an obnoxiously perfect homewrecking old friend. Their bodies are treated as passports to power, and decay signals exile from the only political system they recognize: one where beauty is civic currency, aging is disqualification, and survival requires performing for the male gaze, which functions like a governing institution. What may initially read as narcissism operates more like compliance. 

American beauty culture is often described as frivolous. It is not. Anti-aging is a political economy. The global cosmetic interventions market surpasses tens of billions of dollars annually, propped up by pharmaceuticals, aesthetic surgery, injectables, supplements, and tech-driven “biological optimization.” The film exaggerates this system through its magic potion, yet the potion feels less unrealistic when viewed against Silicon Valley longevity funding, billionaire anti-aging startups, and the modern-day promise that death is simply a solvable design problem. “Death Becomes Her” anticipated the moment when youth would transform from a stage of life to an asset class.

The film’s gender politics are unmistakable. Scholars from Simone de Beauvoir to Susan Bordo have detailed how aging women are culturally constructed as decline narratives, and the movie literalizes this. Immortality, instead of liberating the protagonists, traps them in a capitalist patriarchy in which bodies are aesthetic and maintaining them requires violence against the self. They do not transcend social expectations; they submit to them until submission becomes grotesque.

Rather than treat these characters as merely vain, the film frames them as subjects in a disciplinary system. Their desperation mirrors the real-world coercion embedded in ageist labor markets, in which women face declining earnings and visibility after 40 while men frequently experience the opposite. Hollywood remains an exemplary case in which male actors accumulate gravitas, and female actors are replaced by younger women to maintain a fiction of eternal male desirability. Beauty, therefore, functions not as self-expression but as a regulatory mechanism. The potion in “Death Becomes Her” resembles a public policy, albeit one secretly distributed to the elite.

American immortality fantasies have always served power. The early 20th century’s fascination with eugenics, Reaganite rhetoric of “renewal,” and now the longevity industry’s philanthropic partnerships reveal a throughline where aging is framed as an enemy to national greatness. When Madeline is told she must “take care” of her body forever, the film recalls the language of wellness capitalism, where healthcare responsibility shifts onto individuals, particularly women, who must prevent their own decline to avoid becoming economic burdens. 

The film’s humor obscures its necropolitical insight. If immortality becomes a purchasable commodity, political power will calcify. Those who live longest accumulate political capital and wealth, extending influence indefinitely. The public sphere becomes a gerontocracy not by accident but by design. We see early signs already: out-of-touch elected officials who serve deep into elderly age, corporate leaders who refuse succession, and billionaires who fund life-extension research while healthcare inequality deepens. The question is not whether or not eternal life will exist; the question is who will receive it and on what ideological premise. 

Viewed through this lens, “Death Becomes Her” becomes a cautionary narrative about privatized immortality. The potion is never offered to the public. It circulates among cultural elites, where beauty and money operate as silent qualifications. The secrecy is telling, and if immortality were democratized, its political implications would be obvious. An extended lifespan means extended voting power, extended ownership, and extended gatekeeping over institutions and capital. In the film, immortality must remain secret because if the public knew it existed, it would jeopardize social hierarchies and power structures. Crisis emerges not when someone dies but when there is a risk of democratizing the eternal. 

Still, the cruelty in the film comes from within. No politician forces these women to drink the potion. Their captivity is psychological and cultural, sustained by a feedback loop of insecurity, mediated standards, and commodified beauty. It resembles how contemporary women navigate algorithmic beauty standards, filters, and performance-based selfhood on visual platforms. The pressure to appear youthful is not enforced by law but by social media economies, dating marketplaces, celebrity branding, and workplace bias. The film predates Instagram yet anticipates its logic.

What makes the satire durable is that nothing truly supernatural happens. The only impossible element is physical immortality, but everything else mirrors real-world structures. Gendered competition shapes interactions, objectification governs perception, medicalized beauty dictates worth, wealth determines access, aging triggers shame, and the female body is constantly subjected to public judgment. The film shows that when society equates youth with power, individuals will harm themselves to remain legible within political and social hierarchies.

By the end of the film, Helen and Madeline achieve eternal life and find it hollow. They become stuck in this constant state of bodily decay, their bodies rotting with the years, but their consciousness remaining awake. Immortality transforms them into perpetual maintenance projects, trapped in the very insecurities that drove their initial transformation. Death marks the end of life, but here, immortality marks the end of meaning. The system that promised liberation only deepens dependence. 

Contemporary longevity research presents itself as humanitarian innovation, yet the infrastructure of access mirrors the film’s world. Wealthy individuals navigate luxury wellness clinics, undergo experimental therapies, and participate in a global healthcare economy stratified by class. What once functioned as symbolic capital through beauty now risks becoming material citizenship through biological youth. “Death Becomes Her” serves as a warning: immortality under capitalism will not democratize life, but monetize time. 

America is approaching the future the film imagined, a future in which the body is treated like an investment portfolio and cellular aging is a financial consideration. The film dares to imagine immortality and finds not utopia but oligarchy. If death is natural, inequality is not. Within this political framework, the grave is replaced with endless maintenance, exhaustion, and a desperate pursuit of perfection that delivers only survival, never power. The satire lands because it mirrors our culture—a nation terrified of aging becomes a nation unprepared for justice.

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This article was edited by Brett Poggi and Amethyst Kirwin.