Bad Faith, Death and Neoliberal Funny Business in Weekend at Bernie's : The Working Dead

This article reads Weekend at Bernie's (Ted Kotcheff, 1989) as not merely a throwaway farce, but an elucidation of the ways in which the logic of late capitalism both cultivates and relies on what Jean-Paul Sartre terms bad faith. Situated within this context, the film crystalises neoliberal logic through a highly specific rendering of 1980s corporate culture, from which the central conceit of the plot emerges: the absurd spectacle of a dead man dragged around, his corpse manipulated and posed to sustain the illusion of life. I triangulate the concepts of bad faith, death and neoliberalism by reading Weekend at Bernie's as a commentary on the cultural logic of late capitalism.