The final frontier. Do we have anything, really, to fear from it? As the kids all say just before being Rube Goldbergianly sliced to ribbons in the FINAL DESTINATION movies, 'it's a part of life; if it happens, it happens... but it's not an intelligent, scheming force - that's ridiculous!'
And then, of course, that intelligent force dices them real pretty.
But Death has always been personified in films, plays, novels. And who's to say those diced kids don't wake up in a better place, or get reincarnated back into the game, or better yet, get to sleep forever and never return to this sorrowful jail existence?
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| Destiny - 1921 - dir. Fritz Lang |
When death comes in his/her figurative onscreen representation, it's guaranteed to be a wee bit trite unless said figure manages to harness both the 'significant change is scary but there's nothing to fear' aspect and the 'from which no traveler returns' aspect. Death is not cruel or unkind, but merciful! Yet also, terrifying. Without the latter, the former has no function - there can't be mercy without suffering - and once one is no longer afraid, death is beautiful. Because, in the end, unless you're talking about a snuff film, cinematic death is hardly permanent. It's just a dramatic twitching agony then lying still, like children play in the backyard. Anyone can return from the dead for a sequel, or at the very least, hop up from the ground after the director yells, cut! All life and death fades with the waking up from the 'reality' of the film to the future memory of the viewer as he or she sets about gathering his or her popcorn and scarf, moseying out the theater, looking for car keys and maybe gazing up in suspicion at the far-off moon, all the while heedless of the tiny whirlwind at his feet, and the unmanned tractor trailer rolling ominously a-toward.
1. Jessica Lange as Death - All that Jazz (1977)
One "Bye Bye Life" finale later and I, a small alienated lad of 15, was death's true champion. Factor in a strutting Ben Vereen, glittery glam creatures cavorting in blue and red-veined body suits, and middle-aged chain-smoking choreographer Jake Gideon (Roy Scheider), dying on one level of reality while belting out his smooth sure-am-blueness to the glittering ceiling of the next, and by the third climactic chorus the hairs stood on my neck's rough back as the sleeping cock towards Apollo's electric guitar solo womb.
Leading up to this, Gideon (Roy Scheider) shares mostly one way conversations with his personal angel of death, played by a teasingly Mona Lisa-esque Jessica Lange. I love how relaxed, even flirty, Gideon is in these scenes, and I love his nonstop momentum; even when he's heart attacking his way along empty hospital corridors he's not going to stop reaching towards his own silver-lined black cloud future. Mortality's crossing guards--the hospital staff and surgeons-- are ignored like some needlessly nervous mom at a carless corner. And since Jake's psychopomp is such a glowing, white-clad hottie, what's to fear? The last shot may be painfully abrupt, throwing us out the door to the far-less sexy Ethel Mermen's belting "There's No Business (Like Show Business)" while Gideon's pale husk is zippered up into a body bag, but at least Jake went out to a pinnacle Bob Fosse moment. When I die, it's this film I want as the last thing I see before I die.
2. Frederic March as Death in Death Takes a Holiday (1933)
Death got good press in the pre-code 1930s, when surrealism, Dada, and avant garde metaphysical probing was all the rage at the nationally-sponsored theaters. In this play (made into the 1933 film with March and later Meet Joe Black) Death poses as a living count and meets a far-away-eyed debutante (Evelyn Venable, who is awesome). She's death-obsessed enough to make Bella Swan seem like Mary Poppins; and her Edward ain't some deer-blood drinking Puritan, but Death with a capital S for Scythe. Love + Death = Modernism, a cry-in-your-whiskey highball for your dead gunner and hurrah for the next who dies tradition. This isn't available on DVD, except as an extra on the two-disc, Meet Joe Black (Ultimate Edition)
, which since you can pick it up for under two dollars is worth getting just for that, even if you (wisely) avoid JOE BLACK itself, like the proverbial plague.
3.Cedric Hardwicke as Mr. Brink - On Borrowed Time (1939)
, which since you can pick it up for under two dollars is worth getting just for that, even if you (wisely) avoid JOE BLACK itself, like the proverbial plague.
3.Cedric Hardwicke as Mr. Brink - On Borrowed Time (1939)
"...On Borrowed Time could have been expanded from out of one of the ideas that featured in the background of Death Takes a Holiday – the idea that while Death is present on Earth all mortality is held in suspension. Both films also portray Death as a rather decent figure – here Death waits for people to finish what they’re doing before claiming them, something you can’t help but compare to various accounts of less than dignified death in real life. It’s worth comparing both films to the afterlife fantasies of the 1940s that emerged following the US entry into WWII – the likes of Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941) and A Guy Named Joe (1943). Death Takes a Holiday and On Borrowed Time seem to hold the view that Death is a matter of people genteelly learning to accept the natural processes of life, whereas the films of the 1940s by comparison seem almost hysteric in the need to prove to people the existence of an afterlife in defiance of true (Wartime) tragedy." - Richard Schieb
4. Bengt Ekerot as Death - The Seventh Seal (1957)
When it comes to personifications of the big D, no one plays it like Ekerot in Bergman's most recognized and satirized of gloomfests. With his skull-tight cowl, pale face and big reptilian eyes, Ekerot is both scary and civilized, sexless yet charismatic. He relishes the chance to hang with a cool dude like this weary knight Max von Sydow, before the inevitable reaping. A true nobleman is hard to find in amidst Death's daily haul.
We can't even imagine now, all smug in our finery, that once upon a time there was 'the arthouse' and titans like Kurosawa and Bergman were dropping genius groundbreakers all up in there, and something like Seventh Seal was gobbled up, digested, and then transformed into Woody Allen homages before it could even leave the theater. Now indies and imports are neo-realist downers or twee quirkfests, and lofty art draws chuckles proportionate only to its reach. This Death chess game alone lives to tell the tale.
5. The Red Death - The Masque of the Red Death. (1964)
One of the sillier aspects of this film is that not only is there a guy in a red robe to be the 'red death' but there's a whole rainbow of robed figures at the end, sewing plague like Skittles throughout the Middle Ages. And our main red robed figure doesn't play chess with Prospero (Vincent Price) the Satanic figure who locks up his gates in a futile attempt to keep the plague at bay, he plays cards with a little peasant girl from the village Price has earlier--half out of sadistic whim out of plague-times necessity--burned to the ground.
Poe would never be so populist in rooting against such a charismatic monster and usually screenwriter Charles Beaumont likes him too, but it doesn't matter, for when this weird death in his robe with a mask that makes him look like a fuller brush come to life gets to deliver the comeuppance Price's Prospero has been secretly longing for all along, the now dripping red paint Prospero leads the cast in a wild interpretive dance!
6.a) María Casares as the Princess / Death - Orpheus (1950)
Jean Cocteau's dreamy allegory finds a brooding cafe poet Orpheus (Jean Marais) haunted by regal Spanish actress María Casares, who reaches out to him from the reflective pool / mirror. Orpheus' clueless wife, Eurydice (Marie Déa) would prefer her husband stop listening to his muse's sweet words, which are coming over his car radio like a ghost transmission from WW2, the days when broadcasts regularly included long strings of seemingly jumbled code words meant to confuse the eavesdropping Nazis. I had a strong yen for Cesares seeing this the first time as she reminded me a lot of my then wife, an Argentine socialist intellectual filmmaker. Now I think avoid the film como de proverbial plaga.
6.b) Death - Black Orpheus (1959)
A spurned lover gone homicidal puts on a theatrical skeleton mask and stalks his ex through carnivale in this entrancing, uber-rhythmic festival of color, movement, and amour. The film electrified art house crowds and put bossa nova on the map. And the death figure here is genuinely scary. We know what's going to happen: Eurydice will die and Orpheus will make his deal (here with some voodoo practitioners hanging out in an empty theater) and so forth, but knowing what's going to happen just makes it that much more tragic, as if death was an inexorable magnetic force that all the dancing in the world can't keep at bay for long. Sooner or later, even carnivale ends.
... Keifer Sutherland's return of the repressed is the worst of all the others, a mysterious incarnation of a bully who used to torment him in grammar school. Dressed in Halloween hoodie and toy scythe, Billy beats the crap out of grown-up Sutherland with the force of a Scorsese bouncer. Later, Sutherland has grown used to the assaults and every night develops a new strategy to deal with it, like trying to get rid of the hiccups through sheer will power-- which sometimes works... with hiccups, not with Billy Mahoney. In a great scene we see Kief's become a kind of death junkie: he rocks back and forth, chanting, "Come on, Billy Mahoney! Come on Billy!" daring him, invoking him. (I like to think PJ Harvey's song "C'mon Billy" is based on that scene). Anyway, a chill enters the room, and his skin gets paler and skulls are superimposed everywhere, not in the cheap EXORCIST THE VERSION YOU'VE NEVER SEEN way, but in the barely noticeable way... the way you can only detect if you're very sick or otherwise open to hallucinations (for what are hallucinations but the ability to see all of life as it really is, alive with dying?) -more
8. Robert Redford as Harold Belden - Twilight Zone (1962 - "Nothing in the Dark")
There are certain TZ episodes we all remember - Burgess with his glasses, Shatner with his gremlin, and Robert Redford as a wounded cop who's really death personified, come to claim some old broad scared who's been locking her door to all visitors for she knows old death is comin' soon.
Redford was just a kitten at the time, but he's perfectly cast - who could resist his gentle beauty? When he comes for you, a feeling of flattered grace subsumes all dread. Look at him, that unwrinkled brow and eyes used to charming girls of all ages without strain; why, he wouldn't even hurt a fly.
9. The Rube Goldberg Variations - Final Destination (series)
What makes these films fascinating as artifacts of modern horror cinema is the personification of death isn't anthropomorphic but rather the entire environment: electrical current, turning wheels, weather patterns, freight, breezes, asphalt, airplanes, roller coasters, horses, and even a 3-D multiplex theater itself. The concept that somehow a premonition of death 'shouldn't' have happened, forcing death to work overtime in claiming the lives of those who escaped their scheduled demise suggests, in a sense, that certain agents inherent in our DNA are at war with the inescapable force of mortality, that death has a regimented schedule which our premonitory powers are forever trying to disrupt.
What makes these films effective as 'fun' stems from the very easy way we can recognize death's movements in random events; there is no single figure of malice but just as we as viewers effectively occupy a 'no space' omnipresence in the films we watch, we have no trouble recognizing the work of this invisible Goldberg coincidence time-space serpent.
We're there, after all, to see it 'perform' its repossessions. The temporary escape from fate provided by the protagonist's vision might even be a 'head start' kind of approach on death's part. And, in a sense, by making Death appear vulnerable to being even temporarily escaped, and making it resemble us as invisible, omniscient viewers, the Final Destination films ally us with Death in a temporary partnership, making us feel immortal. As long as we see what death sees, as long as we remain invisible within the narrative frame, we're safe from being seen, and therefore 'taken'.
10. Death as a bank of TV monitors - Scrooged (1997)
As the maker of the medium (the executive producer of a major network), Bill Murray's Scrooge is a new kind of miser, hogging the time his employees would spend with their families to force them into making a live Xmas eve broadcast. When the Ghost of Xmas Future finally arrives it's ingeniously through the one place this Scrooge feels safe - the TV, ala Samara in THE RING, trashing all sense of immortality, which a life spent as a free-floating ghost inside the televisual image tends to instill. There's no arguing for mercy with a TV monitor showing a metallic skull shouting down at you in a howl of white noise. The program has begun. When it turns its eyeless sockets towards thee... oh man, there's no off button that can save you. You've grown so used to the simulacrum there's no way out; it's like the very air you swim in suddenly becomes cognizant of your presence, and hunts you down. Turns out you were never a friendly invited ghost - just a mouse that, once discovered, warrants immediate extermination.
11. Charlotte Rampling - Vanishing Point (1971)
Here lies the blurry mile marker between the couple on the run in a car across the expanse of the American dream (see Cinemarchetype 22, the Outlaw Pair-Bond) and the driver alone who has already, in a sense, broken free. How many victory laps does he need before Charlotte Rampling appears?
My advice, videotape yourself when at the height of your being in love and totally happy. Ten years later after the bloom has faded you can watch it and realize yes, you were in love, you were happy, even if you don't remember it. That's the trade-off. To paraphrase Tolstoy, that's why truly happy people are invariably uninteresting writers. That's why all the best couples need to die at the end, or else escape to Mexico, beyond the reach of cameras. That's why even if you're all alone and speeding across the country, you will receive a lovely hitchhiker just before you make it through the Monte Hellman celluloid burn.
12. Marius Goring as Conductor 71 - A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
He "lost his head in the second germinal of the so-called French revolution." and so, being French, is secretly on the side of the British WW2 bombardier (David Niven) he was supposed to collect as he plummeted sans parachute into the Channel. Damn that British fog! In the meantime Niven has survived and fallen in love with radio operator Kim Hunter, a Yank!, thus the three of them form a kind of allied front in arguing against the necessity of Niven's going at his appointed time. The French may be many things, but when it comes to love they are always on its side - prizing it even above death, apparently.
Inversing the usual WIZARD OF OZ split, Great Britain-- is awash in glorious Technicolor; each scene of stout-hearted wartime life along the shore is so beautiful it seems like heaven, while the Other World is in black and white, and overly clerical, mirroring the endless lines servicemen had to stand in, for chow, uniforms, assignments, etc. So Conductor 71, while embarrassed by his failure to bring Niven in on schedule, secretly appreciates being compelled to linger in the Technicolor splendor. He even jokes "Do you play chess? We could play.... every day," as if riffing on a film still eleven years from being made.
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| Bonus! Death as PCP hallucination, Disco Godfather |
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