Reflections about movies and death

As some of you know, I had to make an unanticipated trip to California a few weeks back. My mother-in-law Sally died suddenly. She was in hospice care, but declined quickly and unexpectedly. Fortunately my wife and her sister were able to be with Sally the last four days of her life.

As I was flying back home, I recalled that I had made the same pilgrimage twice before: After my father’s death in 2003 and my mother’s in 2007.

And that got me thinking about death.

Just as darkness helps to define light, death can be one of the ways we define and even choose to perceive life. Remember that saying: “Live each day as if it was your last.” What if we actually lived like that?

I think I know why scant few of us do — because to live each day as if it was your last one would be to live with a profound awareness of death all the time.

That’s a scary and burdensome thing to do.

Moreover we are trained from early on in our childhood to incorporate the idea of death into our consciousness, then essentially relativize it.

Per the training as a child, think about these:

* “Cross my hear and hope to die.”

* “Now I lay me down to sleep, pray the Lord my soul to keep; and if I die before I wake, pray the Lord my soul to take.”

* Playing games of the imagination — war games, cops and robbers, good guys and bad guys — where one moment, we ‘die,’ then we’re alive again and now it’s one of our friends turns to ‘die’

Psychologically it’s critical that a child learn how to incorporate the idea of death into their thinking. By the time they have the ability to grasp the concept of permanence — typically around 6 years old — they will have become familiar enough with the notion of death to make that transition from fantasy to reality.

But then the next part of our education begins: Now that we understand the concepts of death and permanence, somehow we have to learn how to live with the knowledge that (A) we are going to die and (B) we could die at any moment.

How do we manage to pull that off? I contend that much of what goes on in education and socialization essentially is geared toward neutering the impact of those realities. Part of that is, I think, a reflection of the fact that if we dwell too much on the possibility of death, we can become hamstrung, unable to be proactive in our lives. But part of it is tied to an innate human instinct to turn aside from painful or ugly realities. Indeed if you take a meta view of advertising, it seems like a big part of their message is about how we can live forever, be beautiful forever, be strong forever…

One time before I started writing a screenplay that involved a central character who was dying of cancer, I emailed poet and friend Kurt Brown, asking if he could send me a good poem about death. This was his reply:

“Scott, all poems are about death.”

What I’ve just written thus far in this post basically sums up what I was thinking on my flight home following Sally’s death.

Then I started to think about Kurt’s observation. If all poems are about death, what about stories? And if stories, what about movies?

Obviously death is used time and time again in movies in a symbolic way — the end of a relationship, the failure of a business, the last game of a season.

But what about actual death, characters who physically expire in movies?

So I went to IMDB and looked at the top 25 movies of all time as voted by IMDB users. They are:

1.9.1The Shawshank Redemption (1994)488,7632.9.1The Godfather (1972)391,9343.9.0The Godfather: Part II (1974)232,0284.8.9Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo. (1966)148,8545.8.9Pulp Fiction (1994)396,5516.8.8Schindler’s List (1993)262,4087.8.812 Angry Men (1957)109,7618.8.8One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)202,5559.8.8Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back (1980)265,43110.8.8The Dark Knight (2008)435,84511.8.8The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)346,88812.8.8Star Wars (1977)309,33013.8.7Casablanca (1942)161,22714.8.7Shichinin no samurai (1954)92,20815.8.7Goodfellas (1990)217,66916.8.7Fight Club (1999)361,59217.8.7Cidade de Deus (2002)156,67918.8.7The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)371,31419.8.7Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)233,31620.8.7Rear Window (1954)113,26921.8.7The Usual Suspects (1995)255,48622.8.7Psycho (1960)136,38323.8.7C’era una volta il West (1968)69,55624.8.6The Silence of the Lambs (1991)233,09225.8.6The Matrix (1999)362,815
In every one of those movies, at least one character dies. Think about that. The 25 most popular movies on arguably the most popular movie site on the web, and every single one of them has at least one actual death as a narrative component.

What does this mean?

Presumably a lot. And I ask your opinion on the subject in comments.

The one thing I’d like to say is this: Movies provide an important psychological function, allowing viewers to ‘experience’ death in a safe way, not actual physical death, but — to the degree that we enter ‘into’ the lives of the movie’s characters — emotionally through what transpires on screen.

Why is death so prevalent in movies? Because we know. We know we are going to die. We know at any second, we could get hit by a meteorite. Or swallowed up by an earthquake. Or cut down by an aneurysm.

We’re not comfortable with those thoughts. They scare us. But we know — as we’ve known since our childhood — that this is the reality: life ends in death.

And so as afraid as we are to sit with the awareness of our mortality, we are drawn to poems, stories, and movies — those ‘safe’ places — to experience death, to feel those feelings of sadness and loss, terror and fear, and sometimes relief and even beauty.

What are your thoughts? About death? About the prevalence of death in movies? About the power of movies to tell stories involving death? What is that about? What is going on there? Have you ever written a script involving death as a significant narrative element? What was that experience like?

Finally as long as we’re here in this emotional ‘place,’ how about each of us take a moment, close our eyes, and remember those loved ones of ours who have passed away. Think about them. Their faces. Their lives. What they meant to you and to others. And give thanks for what we shared together with them.

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