Judging by the movies they’re making about cancer, terminal illness and imminent death, the kids are alright. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is the latest in a recent surge of movies about young people dying that have all been uncommonly realistic and unflinching about the uglier, more sombre aspects of death. Like last summer’s champion tearjerker The Fault in Our Stars, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl gives us another terminally ill girl, befriended by two movie-crazy high school boys who decide to make a movie especially for her.
It’s all very lighthearted then, but the movie’s protagonists, as in Fault, must sooner or later face up to the increasing likelihood of death. Their initial responses – rage followed by a macabre, black-comic embrace of the patient’s horror, and a fragile, chin-up, show-must-go-on attitude – give way to unfeigned anger and grief as the end draws near. The boys’ friendship is tested to its limits (just like the friendship between tumor patient Joseph Gordon Levitt and his stoner pal Seth Rogen in 50/50) as the diagnosis leads to chemotherapy, baldness, vomiting, denial once more, and that familiar rage against death.
Another approach can be seen in My Life Without Me, in which Sarah Polley, with two months to live, tells nobody, but instead begins to prepare those she will leave behind: setting her unemployed husband up with work and a new partner, and working out what will happen to her daughters. It’s like a downbeat version of The Bucket List, and she never mentions her plight to a soul.
Time was, death was kept out of the movies, cancer was a stigma deriving from something bad in your karma and a culture of euphemism prevailed until surprisingly recently. If a character died of a terminal disease in movies from the 1930s to the 1970s, it was more often than not some sanitized, entirely symptomless ailment, one that left the body quite free of ravages, no buboes, no lesions, no vomiting blood into a bedpan, no adult diapers, no skeletal remnant, no gargling death rattle. In fact, in movies as diverse as Camille, Letter From anUnknown Woman and Dark Victory, one might have been forgiven for never realising what a protagonist was dying of. The only symptoms common to the deaths in these movies seem to be extreme soft-focus and an ethereally gentle and diffuse light around the deathbed.
And this never really went away. Even as our familiarity with death increased, that soft lighting would glow on undimmed. We never even get a diagnosis for Ali McGraw’s Jenny in Love Story, though we can probably assume it’s leukemia, which destroys you from within, not without, so she too dies under the tender ministrations of the lighting department. Ditto Dying Young, in which Campbell Scott (leukemia) stays young and handsome to the bitter end, Charlize Theron (non-Hodgkin lymphoma) in Sweet November, and Winona Ryder (neuroblastoma) in Autumn in New York.
What about the end of life when it arrives at the actual end, rather than far too early? We get the bitterest sense of loss, even before death, in movies about Alzheimer’s and dementia like Iris, Still Alice and Away From Her, in which spouses Jim Broadbent, Alex Baldwin and Gordon Pinsent can only stand by as their beloved partners’ minds and memories cave in on them, the bitterness only increased by their occasional returns to lucidity. “Old age is a shipwreck,” De Gaulle said of the Vichy-era Pétain, and we get raw glimpses of that disintegration in Magnolia, in which Jason Robards’ formerly vibrant and difficult family patriarch is reduced to a drooling, gargling shape under the bedsheets, but more especially in Michael Haneke’s Amour, which spares us nothing in the physical realm – changing sheets, diapers, and bath-time – but adds, for extra discomfort, as is Haneke’s habit, the emotional toil taken on the equally elderly but less ill partner doing the caring. That these two ancient people are played by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, known to us through five decades of European cinema as imperishable specimens of male and female beauty, makes the nakedness of their ageing, failing and fading all the more poignant.
And then there is Aids, unique to itself in some ways, but an enormous influence on modern thinking about mortality and final care, and likewise on movies. The epidemic of the 1980s was the first time since the Somme and Passchendaele that death had concentrated its focus so fiercely and narrowly on such a specific demographic, largely youthful gay men of the Baby Boom. And death came in such horrifying ways; with the antiviral gatekeepers of the body all disabled and suddenly useless, men were dying of things cured decades and centuries before. And all of it compounded by a largely ignorant, scared and homophobic public, and the callously indifferent Reagan administration.
And Hollywood didn’t do much better, making its first studio-backed statement on the disease only in 1993 with Philadelphia (much like the too-little-too-late Oscar-winning Vietnam movies of the late 70s). Until then it had been left to the independent sector. Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances spoke from within the crisis, and did so with subtlety, wit and poise, but Sherwood himself died of Aids in 1990 and never made another movie. Longtime Companion is more handsomely mounted and built to jerk tears, but packs an enormous emotional wallop, pacing itself out one day per year over a decade of diagnoses, rapid declines, funerals and the steady narrowing down of a once-vibrant circle of friends. In these movies, death is faced squarely and head-on, and so are all its symptoms and dislocation. In the mainstream, movies like Dallas Buyers’ Club go full-tilt on the emaciation, lesions and gruesome symptoms only now, 30 years later, when the epidemic is safely a part of ancient history.
In the end, how badly do we wish to witness death at the movies? A full-scale recreation of the worst symptoms of the Aids epidemic would be as tasteless and controversial as recreating aspects of the Holocaust, verging, in Claude Lanzmann’s formulation, on the pornographic. And, to be crass, such a film would be neither entertaining to audiences nor remunerative to its backers. Even away from all that, to see a man or woman patently dying on screen is grievously upsetting under any terms.
To watch elderly movie director Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause, They Live by Night) dying slowly, for real, in Lightning over Water, co-directed by Ray and his protege Wim Wenders, is grueling and semi-exploitative even if Ray’s name is on the box. Here is a man whose work venerated the young and rebellious; and here he is in his eye-patch and hospital gown getting chemo, literally shrinking before our eyes. Young or old, death doesn’t improve with closer acquaintance, even if the movies about it are getting better all the time.
