Death Be Not Chic
by Judy Bachrach
JUNE 9, 2011 TAGS:
“I’ve not given up thinking of death,” said Levin. “It’s true that it’s high time I was dead; and that all this is nonsense. . . . I do value my ideas and my work awfully; but in reality only consider this: all this world of ours is nothing but a speck of mildew, which has grown up on a tiny planet . . . it’s all dust and ashes.”
I’ve been looking everywhere for a passage from a recent book, a scene from a film, or a television episode that approximates Tolstoy’s take on death in Anna Karenina — that is, an up-to-date, accessible version not simply of what death (or dying) encompasses, but what it signifies in the larger scheme of things.
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As Tolstoy noted in the passage above: Death defines us. It’s a serious business if only because it’s the last business we shall ever perform, and how we perform it might well be beyond our control. If it is within our control, even if we manage to carry it off with what the nondead call “dignity” or “courage,” how does that avail us? Whom does it benefit? Not the dead, certainly.
Death marks us permanently — and not simply because we are all, in another sense, marked men. Death defines who we are now and, inevitably, how we and our accomplishments will be considered at some later date most of us would generally prefer not to think about. At all.
However, this is not necessarily the approach popular culture chooses to take on the subject. Our culture doesn’t ignore death. In modern films and on television dramas, it’s everywhere: on fictive battlefields and in outer space; in the ER and the forensics lab; in the dire diagnoses of some crusty, limping doctor on a Fox network drama and ballooning from the plumped-up lips of brilliant babe doctors on Grey’s Anatomy.
But here is the insurmountable problem: Their kind of death is not death. Or to put it another way: The death you see on the screen will not be the death you have. Let’s start with movies, where death is presented in a manner that’s skewed (but slightly different) from the final act you see on TV. In films these days death is nothing special. Or rather, nothing really special. It is simply another in a series of exciting and quite attractive human events that will eventually yield — much like falling in love, weddings, births, or even a fight with your fiancé — a tempestuous but ultimately wonderfully satisfactory ending. Thus we have in the recent movie The Lovely Bones (based on Alice Sebold’s best-selling book of the same title) a story about a teenage murder victim who, despite the seeming finality of her fate, manages to watch over her family — and exact revenge on her killer — from some undisclosed location in the Great Beyond.
This isn’t exactly a glossy new reflection on the nature of death. The Lovely Bones is only the most recent descendant of Defending Your Life, a comedy from 1991 starring Meryl Streep and Albert Brooks, described by Geffen Pictures as follows: “In an Afterlife resembling the present-day U.S., people must prove their worth by showing in court how they have demonstrated courage....” How is that for a comforting and culturally apt denouement? Americans will all, one day, find ourselves in the alternate universe of a heavenly courtroom! But Defending Your Life itself was a distant cousin of Always, a 1989 film starring Richard Dreyfuss as a lively but unfortunately dead pilot whose mortality seems to be in serious dispute. As the movie’s tagline teased: “They couldn’t hear him. They couldn’t see him. But he was there when they needed him. Even after he was gone.”
.jpg)
Even tepid conventional movies such as these have issues with the idea that death is . . . well . . . death. And finite. The 1998 film Meet Joe Black, whose entire plot was focused on the process of permanently expiring (a rarity for boffo prospects), had as its star a rather baby-faced Grim Reaper: Brad Pitt. Yes, in this movie Brad Pitt is Death, a circumstance that — if it turns out to be true — might reshuffle a lot of our prejudices.
And why not? Death in this movie is in its own way just a comforting update of Tennessee Williams’ Gentleman Caller: a young man who falls in love with the daughter of an incredibly rich tycoon (played in the film by Anthony Hopkins). And while by film’s end we don’t exactly get a voice-over narrative fit for the New York Times’ “Vows” section (“Imagine my surprise when I found out what he really did for a living!”), the same sense of forced bemusement suffuses the whole picture.
Death, in other words, isn’t some old coot with a scythe and a bad wardrobe, he’s great in bed! He buys his clothes from Tom Ford! He’s got a conscience! You can, without a moment’s pang, invite him home to meet your parents — especially if there’s a fair chance of a sizable inheritance from Dad.
Two years later, along came Autumn in New York, an updated version of Love Story (or perhaps Terms of Endearment) in which pretty Winona Ryder, age 22 and size 0, falls in love with a callous gray-haired playboy, played by Richard Gere. The startling plot twist? She’s at death’s door with a rare heart condition (there is never a lethal disease in a Hollywood screenplay that is merely garden-variety or dull), and he, despite being on the wrong side of 50, is — oh, irony! — really hale. It was hardly an evolution from Autumn to Dying Young, a 1991 movie in which a character played by Julia Roberts nurses a fairly dim-witted stud (Campbell Scott), who does just that.
Recently, there has been one attempt by a filmmaker to grapple somewhat realistically with an insidious and fatal illness: the 2006 film Away from Her. The movie, based on a superb short story by Alice Munro, revolves around the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. Three years ago, critics considered the film a radical departure, a brilliant standout from the usual claptrap that involves fading away on screen. But was it really?
.jpg)
Alzheimer’s is a devastating neurological disease I happen to know a good deal about, unfortunately. My mother has it. The first thing you lose is your memory and, along with it, any shred of common sense. You send cash via Western Union to complete strangers because these strangers promise to increase the sum a thousandfold. You confide in callers inquiring about your Social Security benefits and give out your bank details as well as your home address. You lose valuable items such as jewelry and accuse others of theft. Sometimes those others are in fact thieves. You never can tell. You never will really know. No one will.
Then you lose the rest of you, bit by bit: comprehension; special perception; relationships; personality — by which I mean your former personality. The old personality is replaced by a new one quite unseemly and often terrifying, one that no one close to you recognizes. This new you may exhibit signs of paranoia, fear, violence, and finally the inability to do much of anything, including swallow.
Aside from the loss of memory, Away from Her included almost none of these symptoms. It starred the heartbreakingly beautiful Julie Christie, whose pale blue eyes and lofty cheekbones one can never stop watching, and whose acting skills have only heightened with maturity. She won a Golden Globe for Best Performance that year, and she deserved it.
But fair’s fair. The movie, however exquisitely crafted and well interpreted, didn’t really focus on the Alzheimer’s victim Christie portrayed. It concentrated mainly on how Alzheimer’s affected her husband (played by Gordon Pinsent). By mid-film, Christie was relegated to the back rooms of despair and disintegration — away from us, you might say.
The story then focused on the husband left behind. His misery. His betrayals. His need for love and consolation. And finally, the decisions he makes in the wake of losing his wife, even while she is living. In other words, he was spared. We were spared. The disease was permitted to take its toll, but it wreaked its devastation off-screen.
This is where the “honesty” of filmmaking deliberately denies reality. What I have learned about dying, after many years of hospice volunteer work and more than two years writing an advice column for the terminally ill and their relatives, is this: You don’t look like Wynona Ryder while you’re expiring. You won’t be as hunky as Campbell Scott. You won’t look like Debra Winger — no, not even Winger herself will look like Winger. The Winger we see on screen, her lips and cheeks dusted with floury powder to give her what Hollywood believes to be the verisimilitude of metastasized breast cancer, is not a reflection seen in any hospice mirror.
If your vital signs are failing, it is unlikely that you’ll find a double of Jeremy Northam, from the CBS television show Miami Medical, whose character evidently never loses a patient, at your bedside. Dr. Gregory House will not be hanging around your hospital room saying, as he often does on the Fox show House: “Pretty much all the drugs I prescribe are addictive and dangerous.” That’s because, even when you don’t have a hope of recovering, many real doctors are a lot more scared that you’ll somehow get addicted in your last three days of life than concerned that you’ll die in pain.
If you are taken to a trauma center, it will not be an environment like the one that you find on the NBC show Trauma, which is broadcast in defiance of the terrible ratings it receives, and where people like Dr. Nancy (played by Anastasia Griffith) recover quickly after being broadsided by an oncoming bus. Dr. Nancy had a ruptured spleen. In fact, you may not recover at all. A ruptured spleen can lead to severe blood loss and death. Here’s what’s probably going to happen if you have a long-term illness that, despite all efforts, spreads. Because of the pain medications administered, you will likely be very constipated and perhaps nauseous. The sicker you get, the less capable you will be of eating. You may have tubes in your throat that will prevent you from talking, so the probability of your delivering a series of invigorating and profound deathbed remarks to loving relatives, as seen, say, on NBC’s ER is minimal. Owing to the effects of medications, you might not even be conscious.
And those relatives gathered around your deathbed? They may not be so loving, when push comes to . . . um . . . shove. Even if they are loving, they might nonetheless want you to move on, as they like to say in our culture. So that they can.
In some sense our culture’s fierce resistance to the bleak inevitable is understandable. Who is eager to experience the fear and impatience of bored relatives huddled together in the face of what one day they, too, will confront? Instead we get television episodes that mask finality, even while pretending to confront it, and films that gloss the ends of our lives with gold dust and perfume, giving us a finale as flimsy, fantastical, absurd, and gorgeous as their dewy-eyed stars. We watch these fictions so we won’t have to think too much about death and, like Tolstoy’s Levin, we tell ourselves, “So one goes on living, amusing oneself with hunting, with work — anything so as not to think of death!”
Judy Bachrach, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, writes regularly for Obit. Death Be Not Chic is excerpted from Acculturated: Twenty-three Savvy Writers Find Hidden Virtue in Reality TV, Chick Lit, Video Games, and Other Pillars of Pop Culture, edited by Naomi Schaefer Riley and Christine Rosen and published by Templeton Press.
I’ve been looking everywhere for a passage from a recent book, a scene from a film, or a television episode that approximates Tolstoy’s take on death in Anna Karenina — that is, an up-to-date, accessible version not simply of what death (or dying) encompasses, but what it signifies in the larger scheme of things.
As Tolstoy noted in the passage above: Death defines us. It’s a serious business if only because it’s the last business we shall ever perform, and how we perform it might well be beyond our control. If it is within our control, even if we manage to carry it off with what the nondead call “dignity” or “courage,” how does that avail us? Whom does it benefit? Not the dead, certainly.Death marks us permanently — and not simply because we are all, in another sense, marked men. Death defines who we are now and, inevitably, how we and our accomplishments will be considered at some later date most of us would generally prefer not to think about. At all.
However, this is not necessarily the approach popular culture chooses to take on the subject. Our culture doesn’t ignore death. In modern films and on television dramas, it’s everywhere: on fictive battlefields and in outer space; in the ER and the forensics lab; in the dire diagnoses of some crusty, limping doctor on a Fox network drama and ballooning from the plumped-up lips of brilliant babe doctors on Grey’s Anatomy.
But here is the insurmountable problem: Their kind of death is not death. Or to put it another way: The death you see on the screen will not be the death you have. Let’s start with movies, where death is presented in a manner that’s skewed (but slightly different) from the final act you see on TV. In films these days death is nothing special. Or rather, nothing really special. It is simply another in a series of exciting and quite attractive human events that will eventually yield — much like falling in love, weddings, births, or even a fight with your fiancé — a tempestuous but ultimately wonderfully satisfactory ending. Thus we have in the recent movie The Lovely Bones (based on Alice Sebold’s best-selling book of the same title) a story about a teenage murder victim who, despite the seeming finality of her fate, manages to watch over her family — and exact revenge on her killer — from some undisclosed location in the Great Beyond.
This isn’t exactly a glossy new reflection on the nature of death. The Lovely Bones is only the most recent descendant of Defending Your Life, a comedy from 1991 starring Meryl Streep and Albert Brooks, described by Geffen Pictures as follows: “In an Afterlife resembling the present-day U.S., people must prove their worth by showing in court how they have demonstrated courage....” How is that for a comforting and culturally apt denouement? Americans will all, one day, find ourselves in the alternate universe of a heavenly courtroom! But Defending Your Life itself was a distant cousin of Always, a 1989 film starring Richard Dreyfuss as a lively but unfortunately dead pilot whose mortality seems to be in serious dispute. As the movie’s tagline teased: “They couldn’t hear him. They couldn’t see him. But he was there when they needed him. Even after he was gone.”
Even tepid conventional movies such as these have issues with the idea that death is . . . well . . . death. And finite. The 1998 film Meet Joe Black, whose entire plot was focused on the process of permanently expiring (a rarity for boffo prospects), had as its star a rather baby-faced Grim Reaper: Brad Pitt. Yes, in this movie Brad Pitt is Death, a circumstance that — if it turns out to be true — might reshuffle a lot of our prejudices.And why not? Death in this movie is in its own way just a comforting update of Tennessee Williams’ Gentleman Caller: a young man who falls in love with the daughter of an incredibly rich tycoon (played in the film by Anthony Hopkins). And while by film’s end we don’t exactly get a voice-over narrative fit for the New York Times’ “Vows” section (“Imagine my surprise when I found out what he really did for a living!”), the same sense of forced bemusement suffuses the whole picture.
Death, in other words, isn’t some old coot with a scythe and a bad wardrobe, he’s great in bed! He buys his clothes from Tom Ford! He’s got a conscience! You can, without a moment’s pang, invite him home to meet your parents — especially if there’s a fair chance of a sizable inheritance from Dad.
Two years later, along came Autumn in New York, an updated version of Love Story (or perhaps Terms of Endearment) in which pretty Winona Ryder, age 22 and size 0, falls in love with a callous gray-haired playboy, played by Richard Gere. The startling plot twist? She’s at death’s door with a rare heart condition (there is never a lethal disease in a Hollywood screenplay that is merely garden-variety or dull), and he, despite being on the wrong side of 50, is — oh, irony! — really hale. It was hardly an evolution from Autumn to Dying Young, a 1991 movie in which a character played by Julia Roberts nurses a fairly dim-witted stud (Campbell Scott), who does just that.
Recently, there has been one attempt by a filmmaker to grapple somewhat realistically with an insidious and fatal illness: the 2006 film Away from Her. The movie, based on a superb short story by Alice Munro, revolves around the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. Three years ago, critics considered the film a radical departure, a brilliant standout from the usual claptrap that involves fading away on screen. But was it really?
Alzheimer’s is a devastating neurological disease I happen to know a good deal about, unfortunately. My mother has it. The first thing you lose is your memory and, along with it, any shred of common sense. You send cash via Western Union to complete strangers because these strangers promise to increase the sum a thousandfold. You confide in callers inquiring about your Social Security benefits and give out your bank details as well as your home address. You lose valuable items such as jewelry and accuse others of theft. Sometimes those others are in fact thieves. You never can tell. You never will really know. No one will.Then you lose the rest of you, bit by bit: comprehension; special perception; relationships; personality — by which I mean your former personality. The old personality is replaced by a new one quite unseemly and often terrifying, one that no one close to you recognizes. This new you may exhibit signs of paranoia, fear, violence, and finally the inability to do much of anything, including swallow.
Aside from the loss of memory, Away from Her included almost none of these symptoms. It starred the heartbreakingly beautiful Julie Christie, whose pale blue eyes and lofty cheekbones one can never stop watching, and whose acting skills have only heightened with maturity. She won a Golden Globe for Best Performance that year, and she deserved it.
But fair’s fair. The movie, however exquisitely crafted and well interpreted, didn’t really focus on the Alzheimer’s victim Christie portrayed. It concentrated mainly on how Alzheimer’s affected her husband (played by Gordon Pinsent). By mid-film, Christie was relegated to the back rooms of despair and disintegration — away from us, you might say.
The story then focused on the husband left behind. His misery. His betrayals. His need for love and consolation. And finally, the decisions he makes in the wake of losing his wife, even while she is living. In other words, he was spared. We were spared. The disease was permitted to take its toll, but it wreaked its devastation off-screen.
This is where the “honesty” of filmmaking deliberately denies reality. What I have learned about dying, after many years of hospice volunteer work and more than two years writing an advice column for the terminally ill and their relatives, is this: You don’t look like Wynona Ryder while you’re expiring. You won’t be as hunky as Campbell Scott. You won’t look like Debra Winger — no, not even Winger herself will look like Winger. The Winger we see on screen, her lips and cheeks dusted with floury powder to give her what Hollywood believes to be the verisimilitude of metastasized breast cancer, is not a reflection seen in any hospice mirror.If your vital signs are failing, it is unlikely that you’ll find a double of Jeremy Northam, from the CBS television show Miami Medical, whose character evidently never loses a patient, at your bedside. Dr. Gregory House will not be hanging around your hospital room saying, as he often does on the Fox show House: “Pretty much all the drugs I prescribe are addictive and dangerous.” That’s because, even when you don’t have a hope of recovering, many real doctors are a lot more scared that you’ll somehow get addicted in your last three days of life than concerned that you’ll die in pain.
If you are taken to a trauma center, it will not be an environment like the one that you find on the NBC show Trauma, which is broadcast in defiance of the terrible ratings it receives, and where people like Dr. Nancy (played by Anastasia Griffith) recover quickly after being broadsided by an oncoming bus. Dr. Nancy had a ruptured spleen. In fact, you may not recover at all. A ruptured spleen can lead to severe blood loss and death. Here’s what’s probably going to happen if you have a long-term illness that, despite all efforts, spreads. Because of the pain medications administered, you will likely be very constipated and perhaps nauseous. The sicker you get, the less capable you will be of eating. You may have tubes in your throat that will prevent you from talking, so the probability of your delivering a series of invigorating and profound deathbed remarks to loving relatives, as seen, say, on NBC’s ER is minimal. Owing to the effects of medications, you might not even be conscious.
And those relatives gathered around your deathbed? They may not be so loving, when push comes to . . . um . . . shove. Even if they are loving, they might nonetheless want you to move on, as they like to say in our culture. So that they can.
In some sense our culture’s fierce resistance to the bleak inevitable is understandable. Who is eager to experience the fear and impatience of bored relatives huddled together in the face of what one day they, too, will confront? Instead we get television episodes that mask finality, even while pretending to confront it, and films that gloss the ends of our lives with gold dust and perfume, giving us a finale as flimsy, fantastical, absurd, and gorgeous as their dewy-eyed stars. We watch these fictions so we won’t have to think too much about death and, like Tolstoy’s Levin, we tell ourselves, “So one goes on living, amusing oneself with hunting, with work — anything so as not to think of death!”
Judy Bachrach, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, writes regularly for Obit. Death Be Not Chic is excerpted from Acculturated: Twenty-three Savvy Writers Find Hidden Virtue in Reality TV, Chick Lit, Video Games, and Other Pillars of Pop Culture, edited by Naomi Schaefer Riley and Christine Rosen and published by Templeton Press.
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Linda Dickey wrote on June 9, 2011 7:02am
book worth reading w/same view as Levin's: James Kugel's In the Valley of the Shadow. Kugel is an OT scholar and a very very good writer who was diagnosed w/fatal cancer 10 years ago. Not clear why he recovered, but he learned a lot from his experience. [Report Comment]
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