Feature
Death At One's Elbow
Marjorie Gallagher ponders the future (or lack thereof) of narrative cinema, through the eyes of those who have fallen along the way
You can’t escape death. Memento mori is Latin for “Remember you shall die.” There was even a film called Memento in 2000 where Guy Pearce’s character had no short term memory and so had to write notes all over his body to remind himself his wife was dead.
This year has witness a fascination with facing up to one’s mortality with the release of movies like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Seven Pounds and Synecdoche, New York. Released at the beginning of the year preparing for Oscar season, Benjamin Button is the story of a man who heads inescapably towards his death, knowing exactly how much time he has left. Seven Pounds is about a man who selects seven people to receive his organs and plans his suicide with such detail in order to preserve his vital ones. Okay, so he kills himself by sitting in bath filled with ice and box jellyfish, but still he knew when it was going to happen. May saw the release of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York about a theatre director, Caden Cotard. Cotard is the name of a neurological disorder where the person believes that he or she is dead. At the end he concedes and as a voice commands “die”, he closes his eyes.
In each film, our protagonist dies after doing something rather heroic: Brad Pitt dies after giving up the person he loves, in order to shield her from the pain his death would cause; Will Smith dies after giving up his organs and Philip Seymour Hoffman dies after allowing someone else to direct his play.
The current political and economic climate is, one must confess, bleak to say the least, so these types of films - mortality tales, if you will - are perhaps a reflection of this. During the Great Depression the cinema ruled, though in those days the price of a cinema ticket got you a cartoon, a newsreel and B-movie and the main feature. Though most people think of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’ musicals like Top Hat (1935) much more prevalent were gritty thrillers such as The Public Enemy (1931) and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), challenging morals and questioning the authority figures of the day while giving the people of the 1930s somewhere to channel their anger.
So what do we have? So far we have had the films mentioned above that have been about giving us hope in the face of hardship. Now we are in Blockbuster season and this year they were angry and very, very loud: X-Men: Wolverine - Logan a.k.a Wolverine is mad about being turned into a metal freak and when he gets mad he roars, loudly; Terminator Salvation – John Connor is an angry all the time and speaks only with a growl and in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen the whole damn thing is like a jet plane taking off right next to your ear. The one thing all three have in common, apart from their desire to deafen, is that they make no sense. Studios are closing their independent film divisions, like Paramount’s Vantage, and there are new franchises to mine such as Star Trek, Transformers and older ones that have been revamped – Terminator anyone? It seems that Mission: Impossible is being dusted off for a fourth outing. Nothing that isn’t guaranteed to make its money back is getting a look in. Thus it must be concluded that the death of narrative cinema is fast approaching. You could say it’s inevitable.
Marjorie Gallagher