Dissertation

This dissertation is an examination of Western European and North American post-millennial feature films whose narratives follow a protagonist dying from cancer or other terminal illnesses. I will demonstrate how films of this type reflect and comment upon societal conceptions of death and dying. I will also study how they construct intimate relationships between the spectator and the dying subject through privileged access to the protagonist's interiority. My study will explore how the films' engagement with the process of dying gives the spectator a reflexive view of what it means to live and die in 21st century society. In this section, I will discuss how films focussing on death from terminal illnesses differ from trends in mainstream mass media. Secondly, I will establish the discursive framework by which my study will treat the films under discussion. Next I will introduce the parallels with an earlier Western literary tradition that encapsulates contemporary perceptions of death and dying. And finally, I will consider how the works of two 20th century writers inform my analysis of the films. The Forgotten Dead and the 21st Century's Cinematic Memento Mori The works of Vivian Sobchack, Geoffrey Gorer and Peter A. French state that the medical advancements of the 19th and 20th century rendered natural death a taboo subject in public discourse. According to Sobchack, modern medicine negated the communality and intimacy of death. As the process of dying moved from the family home to the hospital room and mortuary "natural death became possible to efface." The obfuscation of natural death occurred at the same time as fatalities from car accidents, industrialised warfare, and large-scale atrocities made death a mechanical phenomenon. Gorer points to the primacy of accidental and violent death governing the 20th century's mediatised portrayals of death: While natural death became more and more smothered in prudery, violent death has played an ever-growing part in the fantasies offered to mass-audiences. Emphasising the role of the derealisation of death in mass media, French posits that "Death is fun in the most popular elements of popular culture, for example in the action/adventure genre of film. It is not really a serious matter." Since death is not usually fun in real life, and my study aims to provide an insight into how films can comment upon and reflect broad societal realities, projections of death in a banal violent context will not be included. This dissertation is limited to films in which death is a serious matter, so much so that the knowledge of impending death is the fulcrum around which the narrative rotates. It will focus on films that foreground the subjectivity of the dying. Rather than promoting fantasies that efface the role of natural death, they provoke questions about what it means to live and die in today's world. Past Life and Future Death Over the course of this study I will discuss the varying degrees to which these films engage with death and dying by aligning the spectator's filmic experience with the protagonist's journey to the grave. My discursive framework is subtended by Emma Wilson's analysis of Hervé Guibert's film La Pudeur et l'impudeur. This film is an auto-documentary about Guibert's death from the AIDS/HIV illness. The montage juxtaposes images of him as a healthy young man with intimate portrayals his emaciated body. It thereby creates "a reminder of future death" with a "vivid, compulsive image of current suffering life" through the layering of images of sickness and health. What is most pertinent here is the film's ability to interpolate temporal difference within an elliptical narrative, creating a Janus-faced cinematic experience that draws the spectator's attention to the past and the future simultaneously. This is especially relevant to this study because I will discuss how the protagonists' journeys to the grave remind their on-screen companions, and the audience, about the inevitability of their own death. Wilson's analysis of the temporal layering of sickness and health will be accentuated with reference to Murray Smith's writing, in order to express the parallels between the films under discussion and an earlier literary tradition. When discussing the spectator's emotive alignment with the protagonist, Smith refers to "spatio-temporal attachment" (the spectator's access to the protagonist's passage through cinematic time and space) and "subjective access" (the "degree to which the spectator is given access to the subjectivities [.] of characters") as salient elements in creating a spectator-protagonist relationship. I will demonstrate that the more access the spectator has to the protagonist's subjectivity, the more likely they are to identify with them. Spatio-temporal attachment and subjective access to the protagonist will be considered in reference to the three states of being that the protagonists pass through in these films. The spectator experiences the protagonist's life before the illness (pre-peripety life); life between peripety and death (post-peripety life); and finally, the liminal space that their consciousness inhabits somewhere between life and death (the liminal psychic realm). Much like Guibert's transposition of time and space, the montages of this study's films allow the three states of being to seep into each other's temporalities. Temporal and spatial linearity is often subverted by a varied range of devices such as flashbacks to pre-peripety life; points of reference to anchor the narrative's meandering flow; omniscient narration form a voice-over, and transitions into the liminal psychic realm. The liminal psychic realm will be discussed in particular detail because its deployment often blurs the line between life, death, and post-mortal consciousness. It is defined as the dreamscape that does not belong exclusively to one spatial or temporal realm. It can include a melange of characters from the living or dead. It may only be accessible when the character is sleeping, or on the point of death; but conversely, it may pervade every aspect of the narrative as otherworldly elements dip in and out of the protagonist's subjective experience. The degree to which it is deployed varies between each film, but it is usually concurrent with highly emotive and thematically significant scenes. Consequently, projections of the liminal psychic realm often act as points of departure from which the films can either affirm or problematise the spectator's preconceptions about life and death in the 21st century. In order to express the breadth of projections of contemporary cinematic death narratives, I have chosen a selection of films encompassing the varied geo-cultural space of the Western world. They share a common engagement with the protagonists' untimely death from a terminal illness; but the tensions between their presentations of the process of dying, and the significance of their death scenes, reveal the breadth of cinema's relationship to societal conceptions of death and dying. Biutiful and Wit will be examined for their wealth of audiovisual and narrative techniques; Les Invasions barbares and The Bucket List will be studied in the context of secular didacticism; and finally Camino and Deux jours à tuer will be studied with reference to the ethics of conforming to a socially acceptable death narrative. Films dealing with degenerative Alzheimer's disease and dementia will not be included. They are separated thematically from this group of films because they usually deal with the incapacitation, rather than death, of their protagonists. The AIDS/HIV trope will not be discussed either. Such films focus heavily on the politics of contamination, homosexuality and homophobia, extraneous to mainstream societal conceptions of natural death. This study aims to express the interrogatory relationship between cinematic death narratives and contemporary conceptions around death and dying; therefore it must focus on the most universal death experience available to the spectator. Since one in three people in Western countries will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives, films following a protagonist dying from cancer and other terminal illnesses are likely to resonate with broader societal concerns. I will discuss how the dying protagonist's status as an emblematic Everyman, coupled with Murray Smith's cinematic devices of alignment and Emma Wilson's analysis of temporal subversion, act to remind the spectator of their own future death. Parallels With An Earlier Western Tradition Films dealing with the natural death of the protagonist share some common features with the Ars Moriendi (The Art of Dying), a literary tradition that enjoyed massive popularity between the fifteenth and eighteenth century in Western Europe. It constitutes a body of deathbed literature that "provided practical guidance for the dying and those attending them." They "informed the dying about what to expect, and prescribed prayers, actions, and attitudes that would lead to a 'good death' and salvation." This was at a time when Western Europe was ravaged by the bubonic plague, a series of deadly famines and the macabre horrors of The Crusades and The Hundred Years War. The point of departure for my study is similar to the Ars Moriendi's didactic traits, despite the relative calm of the 21st century. The parallels between the original tradition and the presence of notions 'the art of dying well' in 21st century Western cinema demonstrate how contemporary media respond to questions surrounding the meaning of life when confronted with mortality, what the dying person should expect, and what is expected of the dying. The two organising principles of the original texts were that the friends of the dying subject (the Moriens) were to help him follow its divine instructions in order to ensure salvation; and secondly, that these funereal assistants (the Morientes) would "apply personally the 'art of dying well' [.] when they have been forced by circumstances to acknowledge the fact of human mortality and to consider its spiritual implications." I will examine the parallels between the six films with reference to the Ars Moriendi tradition, in order to reflect upon contemporary society's conceptions of death and dying. It may seem like a large imaginative leap to relate a subsection of 21st century cinema to a medieval tradition, but it is important to note that many 20th century Western writers have written works highly reminiscent of the didacticism of the original Ars Moriendi tradition. For example, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' seminal work, On Death and Dying, states its intention to "encourage others not to shy away from the 'hopelessly' sick" so that they can "emerge from the experience enriched and perhaps with fewer anxieties about their own finality." In addition, Marie de Hennezel's Intimate Death posits that confronting anxieties around death "pushes us to enter into the heart and depth" of our mortal existence. This propulsion towards an affirmative call to question what it means to live and die in the contemporary era is exposed by the epigraph, "TIME TO START LIVING", on the front The Bucket List's DVD case. The rest of the dissertation will explore the extent to which films following a cinematic Moriens' death narrative, and the role that his attendant Morientes play, relate to societal conceptions of death and dying. I will also argue that the films' varying degrees of spectatorial alignment with the on-screen Moriens can convert the spectator into a complicit Moriente.