Feature
No One Escapes Me!
Marjorie Gallagher challenges Death to a game of Hide ’n’ Seek… and is still hiding…
Death. Inescapable. A silent shadow hovering over life, waiting for the perfect moment. One of the earliest depictions is the Danse Macabre from 1424 - an artistic rendering of the universality of death showing rich and poor alike being led to their grave.
When we think of death now the first image that comes to mind is a tall, hooded figure carrying a scythe. His task varies: for some the Grim Reaper’s task is to take your soul to its final resting place; for others the Reaper can actually cause death, usually by touching the victim. In this version, if death then is not inevitable, he can be bargained with or tricked as a means to escape your fate.
Over the years the cinematic representation of the Grim Reaper has remained much the same - the most famous of course being Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Death appears to a knight (Max Von Sydow) who challenges Death to a game of chess in return for his life. Death is a pallid faced man in black robes, so far so predictable. Yet Bergman’s Death acts as both the confessor and the reaper in a film that asks maybe the most important question of all: why do we exist and for what purpose? He reveals nothing of God or the afterlife. The final shot is of a macabre dance upon a hilltop.
There was a film that came over twenty years before in 1934, called Death Takes a Holiday, where Death literally takes a hiatus from his duties and assumes a mortal existence to see what all the fuss is about. It was remade in 1999 as Meet Joe Black with Death this time in the form of Brad Pitt. I imagine if Death really did look like Pitt he’d have no shortage of souls to choose from. In the original, Death wants to find out why people are so afraid of him. Well, duh. But in the remake, he has come for someone who, just as in The Seventh Seal, delays his passing by offering Mr. Reaper something in return, in this case a guide to life’s simple pleasures. So instead of ruminating on who we are and whether or not there’s a God, Death eats peanut butter and makes love. Hardly the stuff of nightmares.
But, when you think about it death can actually be funny (think the Black Knight). In Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life the Grim Reaper enters a house in the middle of a dinner party, much to their bemusement: “It’s a Mr. Death. He’s come about the reaping?!” Instead of going along with him, or at least trying to bargain with him, they instead and try and have him settle their argument on whether or not there’s an afterlife. It turns out that there is a heaven and it’s a restaurant, where it’s Christmas every day and The Sound of Music plays twice daily on TV. Oh and apparently the meaning of life is be nice to everyone and try not to start any wars and stuff.
Nowadays a literal interpretation of the Grim Reaper can only be found in comedies. Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey say them parody the chess game in The Seventh Seal. However the game has changed to Battleship, then Cluedo and even Twister, all of which Bill and Ted win. Finally Death acquiesces and eventually becomes a member of the Wyld Stallyns. Maybe the most inventive modern day version of the Grim Reaper can be found in Scrooged, an updating of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The Ghost of Christmas Future appears as a giant hooded figure with a TV for a face and shows Bill Murray a terrible vision of the future. Death has become a parody of itself.
Most recently the Grim Reaper is nothing more than a whistling of the wind and a rustling of the trees. It’s a feeling, a vision and it’s inevitable. The Final Destination franchise made the Grim Reaper scary again, though he is not actually in the films themselves, he is in the terrible tragedies that befall the innocent and beautiful people of small town America. He is the sheet of metal that slices off Seann William Scott’s head in the first film; he is the fence that cuts the poor coke snorting kid in the second and he is the sheet of glass that smooshes the unsuspecting teenager in the third. No one escapes death, he has a plan and if you mess with it he gets mad. Though it appears that no one has quite grasped this concept considering there’s a fourth instalment due to hit cinemas this August. Just one thing: how can it be called Final Destination when there have been four films?
Marjorie Gallagher