The Morte Girls

Why funeral service keeps getting misrepresented — and why we shouldn’t stay quiet about it.

There’s a new documentary –Death Boom — making the rounds, and if you work in funeral service, you’ve probably already seen the tagline. It’s the kind of line that makes you stop mid‑scroll, blink twice, and wonder whether anyone involved has ever set foot in a prep room.

“Follows death care workers preparing for 77 million baby boomer deaths, who expose the environmental and mental health impacts of embalming, cremation, and traditional burial.”

Let’s call this what it is: a sensational hook designed to sell a narrative, not tell the truth. And yet — here we are, watching industry publications give it ink as if it were a thoughtful contribution to the conversation around funeral service rather than a caricature of it.

The insult baked into the premise

The framing alone paints funeral directors as:

• opportunists waiting for a demographic windfall
• practitioners of environmentally harmful rituals
• psychologically damaged by the work they do

It’s a neat trick: take a profession built on quiet competence and recast it as a shadowy industry in need of exposure. This is the oldest move in the media distortion playbook — turn dignity into spectacle, and nuance into scandal.

Why the trade publications are playing along

This is the part that stings. Because the question isn’t just why Hollywood is doing this. It’s why our own industry publications are amplifying it.

The answer is a mix of:

• FOMO — the fear of being left out of “the conversation”
• click‑driven coverage — controversy sells
• misguided diplomacy — the belief that acknowledging criticism equals openness

But let’s be honest: none of these motivations serve funeral directors. They serve the publications.

The question my colleague once asked

Years ago, a colleague posed a question that has stayed with me:

If a layperson had to get up from a holiday dinner — Thanksgiving, Christmas, take your pick — leave their warm home on a freezing night, make a difficult house removal, return to the funeral home, embalm, and then show up the next morning as if nothing happened… how much would they expect to be paid?

It’s not a rhetorical question. It’s a mirror held up to the public’s understanding of funeral work — or rather, their lack of it.Because the honest answer is simple. Certainly more than funeral directors are actually paid for their work. And for some, no amount of money would be worth

This is the part no documentary will show: the sacrifice, the skill, the stamina, the emotional labor, the physical labor, the responsibility, the consequences of mistakes, the weight of being the last caretaker.

Enter Hollywood

Because behind this project is none other than Leonardo DiCaprio — a once‑A‑list actor whose career now leans heavily on producing documentaries that allow him to posture as a cultural critic while collecting checks that dwarf the annual salaries of most funeral directors.

What credibility does an overpaid actor have in funeral service? None. Absolutely none.

But Hollywood has always treated professions as props. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, detectives — and now funeral directors — become characters, not professionals. The work becomes metaphor, not responsibility. The dead become aesthetic, not human. This is why Hollywood portrayals of funeral directors are almost always wrong. They’re not meant to be accurate. They’re meant to be interesting.

And that raises a fair question:Why not a documentary about exorbitant Hollywood salaries? Why not a deep dive into the economics of an industry where actors are paid millions to read lines someone else wrote, on sets someone else built, for stories someone else imagined?

Why is our profession — one built on service, sacrifice, and responsibility — treated as the scandal, while Hollywood’s own excesses are treated as normal?

The credibility gap

What exactly qualifies a wealthy actor to weigh in on funeral service?

Has he ever:

• walked into a home where a family is shattered
• carried a body down a narrow staircase
• driven through ice at 2 a.m.
• embalmed until dawn
• stood at the front of a chapel the next morning with steady hands and a steady voice

Of course not. But in today’s media ecosystem, celebrity equals authority. Visibility equals expertise. And the people who know the least about funeral service are often the ones given the biggest platform to talk about it.

The irony no one seems to notice

Funeral directors — the people who do the hardest, least understood, least compensated work — are being critiqued by an industry that pays its stars more for a single film than most funeral directors will earn in a lifetime.

Hollywood lectures funeral service about ethics. Hollywood lectures funeral service about money. Hollywood lectures funeral service about environmental impact. Meanwhile, the carbon footprint of a single blockbuster film dwarfs the annual emissions of many small funeral homes combined. But sure — let’s “expose” embalming.

The real story

The disconnect is not just economic. It’s moral. Funeral directors show up because someone has died and someone must answer that call. Hollywood shows up when there’s a camera.Funeral directors work in the cold, the dark, the quiet, the unseen. Hollywood works in the spotlight. Funeral directors carry the weight of families’ worst moments. Hollywood carries the weight of its own ego. So when a documentary produced by a wealthy actor claims to reveal the “truth” about funeral service, it’s hard not to ask:

Whose truth? And at whose expense?

Why are some funeral homes participating?

This is the uncomfortable part. Because yes — some funeral homes are participating in these projects. And it raises real questions:

Are they suggesting they don’t believe in funeral service? Do they see the work as merely a business, not a calling? Are they chasing attention in a culture that rewards spectacle over substance?

The motivations tend to fall into predictable categories:

• attention‑seeking
• brand confusion — wanting to be both dignified and trendy
• fear of irrelevance
• a misunderstanding of what families actually value

But the most painful possibility is this: Some may not believe in the sanctity of funeral service the way many of us do. They believe in their business, not the work.

What’s really happening

We’re watching a dignity‑based profession being drowned out by an attention‑based culture.

Funeral directors are trained to be discreet, deferential, invisible. The people dominating the conversation about death today are trained to be loud. The result? A profession that has spent generations doing the work quietly is being defined by people who have never done the work at all.

So why speak up now?

Because silence is no longer noble. Because misrepresentation has consequences. Because families deserve better than sensationalism. Because funeral directors deserve better than being portrayed as villains in someone else’s narrative.

And because if we don’t tell the truth about our work, someone else will tell a lie about it.