Death in Classic and Contemporary Film

Fade to Black

D. Sullivan,J. Greenberg

• Éditeur: Palgrave Macmillan
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137276896
• Sujet: Media & Performing Arts
• Sous-sujet: Film History & Criticism

Mortality is a recurrent theme in films across genres, periods, nations, and directors. This book brings together an accomplished set of authors with backgrounds in film analysis, psychology, and philosophy to examine how the knowledge of death, the fear of our mortality, and the ways people cope with mortality are represented in cinema.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: WHEN THE LIGHTS GO DOWN

Daniel Sullivan and Jeff Greenberg

From the corpses of the horror genre to the immortal machines of science fiction, from the philosophical dramas of Ingmar Bergman to the comedies of Woody Allen, from the hilarious morbidity of Weekend at Bernie’s and Death at a Funeral to the somber reflections of Dead Man Walking and The Sea Inside, images of death, dying, and immortality have crowded the reels of many of the best (and best-loved) films. Like literature before it, which was largely inaugurated with the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh—a story that focused on the problem of death and the human response of seeking immortality—cinema has maintained a strong and persistent focus on mortality throughout its comparatively shorter history. The fact that filmmakers have consistently chosen to approach the issue of human mortality in such diverse ways—and the fact that audiences have so often positively responded to their efforts—is a testament to the fact that human life is characterized by two particularly resonant psychological realities: the fear of death and the desire to overcome it. Mortality is a recurrent theme in films across genres, periods, nations, and directors, and the range of films dealing with this theme alone suggests that the link between death and cinema is deserving of sustained analysis.

The problem of mortality even plays a role in many films that are not blatantly centered around death. Indeed, philosophical and psychological perspectives suggest that the human desire to deny the reality of mortality is a unifying construct that can be used to understand the content of films that do not explicitly emphasize death (e.g., Sullivan, Greenberg, & Landau, 2009). In addition, the very act of making movies and going to the cinema can be understood as a social psychological process of mass death denial: Filmmakers and actors hope that their work will make them “immortal,” preserved on celluloid and disc for generations to come (Cave, 2012). And audiences crowd darkened theaters to confront death-related thoughts in safety and over buttered popcorn (Yalom, 1989) while gaining a sense of their own life extended in time as they experience simulated days, weeks, and often years in the span of two hours (Grudin, 1982).

The current volume examines the role of death in films by considering how the knowledge of mortality and the ways people cope with it are represented in particular films and genres of film. The contributing authors illuminate in different ways how the topics of death and humanity’s psychological responses to death contribute to the cinematic medium, and how films provide insight into these existential concerns. Some analyze the role played by death in the narrative of a particular film, while others examine the theme as it manifests in a set of films, the work of a particular filmmaker, or whole genres. Some of the common questions and themes addressed in this book are as follows: How is death portrayed in certain films, and how does death influence the characters and narrative within the film? How do portrayals of death affect the audience watching particular films? How does the human motive to deny or transform the meaning of death manifests in film plots or genres?

This introduction will selectively survey some broad past theoretical and empirical perspectives within the social sciences and humanities that have explored the issue of cinematic death portrayals. Although the present volume is the first anthology of scholarly writings exclusively focused on the importance of death in cinema, there is an extensive, interdisciplinary literature that has either peripherally acknowledged this issue or explored closely related topics, in particular the issue of filmed violence. We will therefore provide a brief overview of these past scholarly approaches to the topic of death and films. In our next section, we present suggestions for going beyond a unidimensional approach to this topic by contextualizing the issue of death in films. Finally, we provide an outline of the present book, and anticipate some broad themes that will emerge across its chapters.

Three Past Approaches to Understanding Death in Films

As in most other areas of human culture, death has been an integral part of film narratives from the inception of the medium (Hankiss, 2001; Niemiec & Schulenberg, 2011). Clearly, at a basic technological level, cinema’s capacity for reproduction and preservation of lived experience represents an advance in the generative quest of human culture to seek forms of immortality. However, beyond cinema’s technical contribution to culture’s ostensible “conquering” of death, narrative cinema specifically often involves death as a key plot element or device and provides culturally sanctioned frames for making sense of this inevitable yet unfathomable experience. Indeed, many scholars (e.g., Grønstad, 2008) have noted that the connection between death and the medium of film may be particularly important because films are uniquely positioned to both show death and explore the influence of the threat of death to self and others in human experience. One examination of popular US films suggested that a death-related sequence occurs every 7–8 minutes in the course of the average film (Schultz & Huet, 2000). Director Andrei Tarkovsky (1986) went so far as to claim that the ultimate purpose of a film should be “to prepare a person for death” (p. 43).

Despite these observations, surprisingly little prior film theory and criticism have focused directly on the issue of death in films. Nevertheless, the issue of cinematic depictions of violence in general—that almost always connotes violent death—has been debated at length in the literature. This debate is illuminating in its own right, because it demonstrates that one of the most common ways in which cinema depicts death is as violent and “unnatural.” Cinema depicts death as alternately romantic, heroic, unexpected, graphic, and terrible—but it only occasionally depicts it as a prolonged and tedious experience, despite the fact that this seems to be how death is actually experienced by many people (Thomson, 2000).

Much of the theory and criticism on violence and death in films acknowledge this basic fantastic quality of most cinematic depictions of death, and venture from this starting point into explorations of the purpose and consequences of such portrayals. Past scholarly frameworks that might be applied to understand the issue of death in films can be roughly classified into three camps or “schools” (naturally, alternate organizational schemes are possible).

The “fantasy and catharsis” school. The broadest of the three approaches described here include some of the earliest theoretical perspectives on films. What these different perspectives share is an emphasis on one (or both) of two ideas: (1) films represent the enactment of certain fantasies individuals have, such as immortality in the case of cinematic death treatments; and (2) films depict anxieties that are typically repressed—such as death anxiety—and therefore allow for cathartic, safe, and vicarious experiences of these anxieties. At a very general level, this school would include theorists who have argued that the purpose of art in general and film in particular is to provide an “otherworldly” aesthetic experience: a window to an ideal world that resonates with and yet stands outside the vagaries of imperfect, mortal existence. Influential early theorists like Münsterberg (1916/2004) and filmmakers like Tarkovsky (1986) argued that narrative cinema, rather than depicting the world as it actually is, approximates the psychological experience of a coherent and meaningful reality, and can therefore satisfy a yearning for the Divine, that is, for a perfect and extraordinary world. On this view, good films rejuvenate our minds by temporarily offering an image of the mundane world and its realities—including the reality of death—that imbues those realities with transcendent meaning and significance.

More specifically, various perspectives focus on particular fantasies or manifestations of anxiety that films allegedly address or enact. In these ways, films allow both their creators and their audiences to work through particular psychological issues for which everyday life does not provide many avenues of safe confrontation. The most straightforward of such perspectives would be that which reinvents Aristotelian notions of catharsis for the cinematic age, suggesting that audiences flock to see violent murder on the screen in order to purge themselves of aggressive tendencies or fears, perhaps even of some primal death instinct. Although it does not appear to be the case that many theorists have ever actually wholeheartedly embraced this theory, policymakers and filmmakers (notably Peckinpah; Dukore, 1999) have certainly invoked it, and many scholars have presented straw-man versions of the catharsis hypothesis against which to contrast their own accounts.

Beyond a simple catharsis explanation, one elemental notion shared by many variants of the fantasy/catharsis perspective on the presence of death in films is that events like (other people’s) death are simultaneously attractive and repulsive. According to this thesis, fantasy and anxiety are often the same, wedded in a kind of captivating ambivalence. This idea is expressed in Kolnai’s (2004) classic writings on the emotion of disgust, and it forms the basis of H. P. Lovecraft’s (1973) theory of horror, which prioritizes the construct of “cosmic terror,” a psychological blend of anxious uncertainty, curiosity, and awe that we experience when supernatural events are fictitiously portrayed. Such perspectives are not so removed from Freud’s (1963) concept of the uncanny, which suggests that entities that are simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar are uniquely frightening. Combining these different strands offers the insight that humans have a complex psychological relationship to mortality, especially when violently inflicted. Death is known to all of us on some level and yet necessarily unknown in a fundamental way; it is intriguing and potentially awe-inspiring, yet also something we supremely dread. Fantasy/catharsis perspectives tend to imply that films permit exploration of these issues at a distance, thereby satisfying our morbid curiosities.

At a slightly higher level of complexity, theorists have put forward specific species or patterns of socially prominent anxiety and fantasy that films address. Many of these fantasies and anxieties are readily interpretable as desires to gain immortality and to avoid mortality. Wood (1979) classically put forward the formula “normality is threatened by the monster” to classify how different cycles of horror films give voice to changing social anxieties, while consistently constituting a creative process of the “return of the repressed.” The repressed anxiety that emerges more unwaveringly than any other is that of death. The “Other” that brings death may change with social norms—from Eastern European vampire to interstellar insect, from Soviet thug to Arab terrorist—but the threat of death always accompanies it. Similarly, a whole subset of the fantasy/catharsis school, derived from the writings of anthropologist Mary Douglas (1968) and their interpretation by psychoanalytic philosopher Julia Kristeva (1982), emphasizes the fascination of the ambiguous and the abject (for an example in film theory, see Creed, 1993). On this view, we define ourselves in contradistinction to marginalized persons and persons in interstitial circumstances of transition; the normal and integral are constituted over and against the ambiguous and fragmented. We are compelled by the spectacle of beings that combine different components of separate organisms (Carroll, 1990), and similarly by that of the person in the twilight space between life and death (Prince, 1998), because we contrast and define ourselves against these marginal states. As Kristeva (1982) writes, “The corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything . . . The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection . . . Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us” (pp. 3–4).

These perspectives tend to focus on genre-specific and stylized enactments of our death-related fears and wishes. A last variant of the fantasy/catharsis approach applies to those films that consciously meditate on the everyday reality of death as it is typically experienced. This perspective (as put forward, for example, by Niemiec & Schulenberg, 2011) emphasizes the idea that some well-made (typically drama) films can actually prepare a person for death by imparting certain coping mechanisms. Films like Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957) or Kurosawa’s Ikiru/To Live (1952) deal primarily with the approaching death of the protagonist, who ultimately gains some degree of death acceptance and a renewed sense of meaning and spirituality as a result of his being-towards-death. Such films, as well as others across diverse genres that incorporate the death of a loved one as a major plot element (ranging from Bambi, 1942, to Amour, 2012), do not primarily sate the nonconscious desire to temporarily experience repressed anxieties and fantasies. Rather, these films provide opportunities to consciously reflect upon and make strides in coming to terms with the problem of mortality—at least in theory.

The “learning/priming effects” school. This branch of prior approaches tends to be more empirical and less theoretical. Proponents of this approach also see cinematic depictions of death and violence less as an “effect” of deep-seated human needs to cope with basic anxieties, and more as a “cause” of negative social outcomes. In other words, these scholars are more interested in the consequences of portrayals of violent or glorified death. The “learning/priming effects” school has two major camps. The first comprises the social scientists who empirically investigate the effects of violent media and depicted killings on viewers. Major psychologists in this camp are Bandura (1962), Berkowitz (e.g., Geen & Berkowitz, 1966), Zillmann (1998), and Bushman (e.g., Bushman & Anderson, 2001). A major representative of this camp in the area of film theory is Prince (2000).

Based on studies in which viewers watch film violence (largely extracted from its narrative context) before being given the opportunity to aggress, these scholars argue (with some variation in the particulars) that viewing violent death exacerbates aggressive or violent tendencies in viewers. This argument is based on two psychological processes. The first is social learning. Humans have, from early childhood, a great capacity to learn through observation and are prone to imitate actions they observe, especially if they identify with the actor and the actions lead to good outcomes for the actor (Bandura, 1962). The second process is priming. When a particular concept is brought to mind, related concepts are also more likely to come to mind and related behaviors are more likely to be enacted (e.g., Chartrand & Bargh, 1996). On this view, watching violence does not purge us of repressed urges; rather, it primes us with and teaches content that actually makes us more likely to enact such urges in the future. As Prince (2000) suggests, this perspective should caution filmmakers and audiences to think critically about h...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Introduction: When the Lights Go Down
• Part I Terror Management Theory and Film
• Part II Aspects of Death Denial in Individual Films and Genres
• Part III Directors Engaging with Death
• Part IV The Prospect of Transcendence
• Notes on Contributors
• Film Title Index
• Subject Index