Death

The best thing about this year of lockdown has been the sighting of so many animals one ordinarily never saw, or, if you did, they were already dead, victims of roadkill or industrial poisoning or sheer exposure. Dead badgers, dead squirrels, dead foxes by the roadside; it was a relief to see so many of them clambering about the trees and branches and pathways (and even my own roof) happily, bouncily, boisterously alive. But now let us consider the alternative. For this is November, the year's penultimate month, the wettest, the dreariest, the deadest – known in Finnish as 'marraskuu', which literally translates as 'Death-month'.

But let us try to avoid poker-faced solemnity. This will be, if possible, a Rhapsody on Death, as life-affirming as we can make it. Let us be briefly breathless in our listing of titles that merely have death in them: The Death of Stalin.[1] The Death of Virgil.[2] Death in Venice.[3] Death Becomes Her.[4] Death Takes a Holiday.[5] Love and Death.[6] Death on Credit.[7] Love and Death on Long Island.[8] The Life and Death of Peter Sellers.[9] Le Morte D'Arthur.[10] Death And The Maiden.[11] Siegfried's Death and Funeral March.[12] Isolde's Liebestod.[13] The Death of Seneca. Death of a Salesman.[14] The Death Star.[15] Two Deaths.[16] The Dead.[17] The Evil Dead. Night of the Living Dead.[18] Dead Man Walking.[19] Dead Calm.[20] Dead of Night.[21] Dead Again.[22] Dead Ringers.[23] Dead Poets Society.[24] Malone Dies.[25] Lord Edgware Dies[26]....

... As the fellow says: 'The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis.' (Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose)

Just to employ the word 'Breathless' – never mind the Godardian echoes (that film is now 60 years young) – is perhaps a bad joke and no doubt seems 'privileged' when so many around us are losing theirs. Yet contrary to the old axiom that one does not genuinely believe one will die until one has seen one's own parents pass, I myself do honestly and earnestly believe in the fact of my own mortality, even without having had to witness the passing of my progenitors. Ever since a car crash in 2005, during which my father and I escaped extinction (or at best paralysis) by a hair's breadth, death has been imminent, the lurking ogre in the corner.

Since that time, every now and then I have been plagued by panic attacks of sorts, involving much hunching over and restless fidgeting and hyperventilating, all begun whenever I started to think too much about the details of my bodily processes, the blinking of my eyes and the dryness of the pupils thereof, the breathing of my lungs and the intake (or lack thereof) of oxygen through my nose (which is always unduly stuffed, a genetic defect, possibly due to lack of sinuses) and out through my mouth, the beating of my heart and the fear of its possibly imminent stoppage, the circulation (or lack thereof – Ginseng tablets may help) of blood through my body – all these unhelpful thoughts bring the prospect of death uncomfortably close to mind. But perhaps if we consider the topic awhile, listing instances and examples and illustrations calmly, impersonally, hopefully humourously, maybe then the fear will ebb and the heartbeat slow to a more tranquil thud.

I am not a fan of the work of Kevin Smith, and yet his recent brush with death (perhaps brought on by overweight and excess cannabis usage) has seemingly granted him a depth of humanity and even wisdom that I would hitherto not have expected of him. He speaks earnestly on the Joe Rogan podcast on how death is not to be feared. The perspective he gained following his heart attack has given him a new serenity.[27] 

Peter Sellers had a similar near-death experience – witness his many Hollywood heart attacks in 1964, during which he was clinically dead for some seven to eleven minutes – but thereafter he became a messianic megalomaniac, reasoning that he had been called back from the edge by some divine intervention, believing that his life had been prolonged so he could fulfill some higher calling (pity that it mainly seemed to entail wasting his talents in a lot of terrible films, bar a few happy exceptions). In the years to follow, he consulted many mediums and fortune tellers who offered varying predictions as to the extent of his lifespan, and at times he was convinced he would live forever, happy to trample other mortals into dust like so many earthworms underfoot. Like Walt Disney, he also considered being cryogenically frozen.

We could also consider famous last words. Oscar Wilde, sick and bloated and possibly syphilitic in Paris, said either he or the wallpaper should go first. Alfred Jarry, absurdist to the last, mumbled: 'I am dying – please bring me a toothpick'. Or then there was Beethoven. Upon seeing a crate of wine had been delivered for him, as he lay expiring and crapulent on his deathbed, he croaked 'Pity, too late'. This pithy little sigh (wine was the only thing that relieved the buzzing in his deafened ears, and also a major contributor to his fatal cirrhosis of the liver) seems more convincing than the other possibly apocryphal final line attributed to him: 'Clap your hands, my friends, the comedy is over' - in Latin, no less. Perhaps this is an interpolation or invention of his forger amanuensis Anton Schindler (the swindler, some called him).

I remember too the less famous instance of a pig farmer in-law I once knew: 'O god, I wish the lord would take me!' he said, promptly before being carried off. Lying back on his pillow after this exclamation, he died swiftly after. It sounds as if he had been heard too clearly.

Many a death can be cast as bathetic in retrospect, like Elvis Presley, dying on the toilet fat and bloated, overstuffed with drugs and hamburger. Yet for many of his fans, The King Is Still Alive and sightings of him have abounded in many a grubby tabloid like The Sunday Sport, alongside the usual clutch of UFOs. Tommy Cooper would die onstage and on camera in the middle of his comedy act; he clutches his side, complains of not feeling well, and the crowd roars, assuming it's all in jest. He keels over, the curtain falls (with his feet sticking out grotesquely) and the punters erupt in applause. Perhaps he went the way many a performer would like to go, before an adoring audience underneath the bright lights, doing the very thing he had lived for and loved, though the moment itself looks to have been painful. (I will not provide a link – watching the footage gives one the queasy feeling of ogling a snuff video.)

As well as the aforementioned Sellers and Disney, fact and fiction provide us with hordes of folks trying to cheat death, like Countess Bathory who reputedly bathed in the blood of virgins to preserve her youth, later gaining renown as a vampire, the subject of trashy horror movies such as Countess Dracula starring Ingrid Pitt[28] – another popular genre that defies death time and again, like the titular Count Vlad himself, who bounces back over and over no matter how many stakes are put through his heart. Or there is Shih Huang Ti, the first Emperor of China as told of by Borges in his essay The Wall and the Books who, as well as building The Great Wall, also demanded the immolation of all the canonical books that came before.

Shih Huang Ti

According to historians, Shih Huang Ti forbade the mention of death and searched for the elixir of immortality. He became a recluse in a figurative palace, which had as many rooms as the number of days in the year. These facts suggest that the wall in space and the fire in time were magic barriers to halt death. Baruch Spinoza has written that all things desire the continuance of their being; perhaps the Emperor and his magicians believed that immortality was intrinsic and that decay could not enter a closed sphere.[29]

So much for shutting the door on death. But consider also those moments when Death assumes a shape, an identity and dramatic character. He appears often in many paintings and drawings, skeletal and stalking, frequently depicted draped in a hood, a cowl, a dark and flowing robe and scythe. In Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, Death plays a significant if not leading role, popping up in virtually all the novels, his dialogue delivered portentously in Capital Letters. (And in the handful of onscreen adaptations of those novels, he is appropriately voiced by the portentous likes of the late Christopher Lee and the late Ian Richardson.)

In Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, the knight Antonius Block (Max Von Sydow) famously plays chess with Death (beautifully embodied by a sardonic Bengt Ekerot, pasty-faced and black-clad) in an attempt to buy some time – in the end, Von Sydow sacrifices himself and throws the game to spare the lives of some traveling players to whom he has taken a shine. Death proclaims that he has no secrets, and in the game, he plays black, which he says 'becomes him well'. He has a very human face, and Bergman has written about how much it meant to portray the embodiment of his greatest fear as no more than a 'white clown', not the traditional reaping skeleton of yore. He describes the process in his book Images: My Life in Film:

...I had recklessly dared to do what I wouldn't dare to do today. The knight performs his morning prayer. When he is ready to pack up his chess set, he turns around, and there stands Death. “Who are you?” asks the knight. “I am Death.”

Bengt Ekerot and I agreed that Death should have the features of a white clown. An amalgamation of a clown mask and a skull. It was a delicate and dangerous artistic move, which could have failed. Suddenly an actor appears in whiteface, dressed all in black, and announces that he is Death. Everyone accepted the dramatic feat that he was Death, instead of saying, “Come on now, don't try to put something over on us! You can't fool us! We can see that you are just a talented actor who is painted white and clad in black! You're not Death at all!” But nobody protested. That made me          feel triumphant and joyous...

...As far back as I can remember, I carried a grim fear of death, which during puberty and my early twenties accelerated into something unbearable... The fact that I, through dying, would no longer exist, that I would walk through the dark portal, that there was something that I could not control, arrange, or foresee, was for me a source of constant horror. That I plucked up my courage and depicted Death as a white clown, a figure who conversed, played chess, and had no secrets, was the first step in my struggle against my monumental fear of death.[30]

This version of Death, a pallid chess-player clad all in black from head to foot, has been parodied often enough, notably by Woody Allen, Bill and Ted,[31] Earthworm Jim, and The Last Action Hero of Arnold Schwarzenegger (wherein Ian McKellen takes the place of the long extinct Ekerot, and steps out of the cinema screen to stalk the streets with his scythe[32]).

Death plays chess. A still from Ingar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.

Death has also been known to take the insipid shape of Brad Pitt, a gawky-cum-hunky young man with a taste for peanut butter – 'there is honest panic in his eyes as the big speeches approach, and he pronounces “Machiavellian” as if Machiavelli were one of tonight's specials'.[33] This version of Death, perpetually shadowing Anthony Hopkins' 'nice Rupert Murdoch' figure, dominates 1998's Meet Joe Black, a soporific and slushy three-hour remake-cum-reimagining of the considerably shorter (and aforementioned) '30s comedy Death Takes A Holiday starring Frederic March. Which of these farragoes would we wish to be left with on the desert island? Or which mundane movie would you wish to be playing behind your eyelids as you expire?[34]

A markedly different depiction of Death occurs in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman series, that monumental opus that reimagines the lives of the gods and demigods – here we find no cliched Grim Reaper, but rather a charmingly scruffy, Goth-inclined young woman, often seen with spiky hair and fishnets, the elder sister of the protagonist Morpheus, and the second eldest overall of the Endless family. (In full, they are Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction – the absentee absconder who has resigned his post – the twins Desire and Despair, and Delirium, who used to be called Delight – it's a sad state of affairs when a happy state must transmute into an insane state.)

Death, as illustrated by Chris Bachalo in
Death: The Time of Your Life #1

Throughout the series, we see this punk vision of Death kindly leading mortals towards their last end, and ironically, of all the siblings, it is she who is most on the side of life. She is the most human of the family; tellingly, her dialogue appears in ordinary word balloons, without any of the typographical extravagances that mark the speeches of her fellow immortals. 'You lived what everyone gets,' she says, 'You got a lifetime. No more. No less.'[35]

Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse (a man meeting death every second day on the job) muses over and over, throughout the thirteen novels, on Socrates' pronouncement that if death be no more than a dreamless sleep, then mankind surely has nothing to fear. These novels were famously filmed, and the pall of death hangs heavy over the final episode The Remorseful Day, made all the more piquant by the fact that the actor John Thaw was himself visibly sick during the filming and did not long outlive his onscreen counterpart, dying two years after the broadcast. He has one marvellous scene where the detective potters about his bachelor flat in his rumpled dressing gown, alone, morose, dejected. He mixes his medicines and painfully shuffles to his armchair. He briefly plays some music – the adagio from Schubert's Quintet in C – but then turns it off. His favourite hobby no longer affords him solace. Instead, he stares into space without blinking, doing absolutely nothing while being absolutely riveting, and the camera tracks in slowly on his haunted features in dead silence, and in that deathly silence, you can see intimations of his impending end playing out on the parched and tortured face.[36]

In Michael Winterbottom's The Trip To Greece, Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan amusingly – yet ultimately movingly – re-enact The Death of Socrates without the aid of togas or period trappings. Brydon reads from the original Plato, Coogan mutely assumes the role of the dying sage taking hemlock. The music is from The Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss, last heard in The Trip to Italy, a poignant call-back. Indeed, the whole four series, a weird mix of travelogue and sitcom, is a telling meditation on mortality, with many cross-continental scenes in graveyards leavened with a legion of celebrity impressions that range from amusing light relief to indications of the possibly pathological (particularly in the case of Brydon, whose 'Roger Moore impersonation duel' with Coogan is allowed to go on so long that it crosses the line from funny to irritating to frightening – 'Less is Moore', says Steve – not so for Rob).

But you can see the men visibly aging in the years between seasons, and the mirthful mood grows ever more melancholic. A discussion of Michael Winner's memorial service, for instance, is gently funny and deeply sad all at once, helped in great part by the music of Michael Nyman.[37] The show ends with an offscreen death, that of Coogan's (fictional) father – he must return to the UK for the funeral, while Brydon alone is allowed to reach Ithaca, and thus fully re-enact the route of Odysseus. All in all, it is a fabulous series, all the more so for how daringly it flirts with over-repetition of the same old tired formula, defiantly risking boredom as it slowly and steadily does itself to death, and thus all the more resembles life itself. It can only grow more moving and suggestive with the years. For more, hit this link. [38]

The death of Don Quixote sees his restoration to sanity and the resumption of his name of Alonso Quixada; he denounces all his chivalric activities, to the dismay of those of his companions who would have him return to his delusions, as though the waking to reality were the harbinger of extinction. This moment of clarity is one of the saddest scenes in literature. For when the dream dies, the dreaming knight dies with it. His fond readers are all the poorer for it. After 1000 pages of companionship, are there any hard hearted enough to wish him death? The best you can do is turn back to the first page, resurrect the sad Don, and relive it all over again.

I will end (like death itself, the ending of endings) with a pair of cases nearer to home or closer to the bone. In my time I have probably been to more funerals than the more lively weddings or christenings. While some funerals can also be life-affirming, especially if they mark a long life well lived, just as many others can be awful. Much as I would like to see the sunny side of the subject, death wants the dark blinds to drop, and has a way of snatching far too many far too soon. The saddest funeral I have ever attended occurred two years ago, when myself and some peers were called to gather to commemorate the passing of a contemporary. She was only twenty-seven and had been killed by a brain haemorrhage. The last time I had seen her, she had been chalky white and skeletally thin, and though she scorned solids, she had been knocking back the alcoholic liquids. One wonders could one have intervened, said something, done something, but it is all far too late and fatuous to ponder other outcomes. On the day I got the news, I had received a missed call from her number. This turns out to have been from her father, torturously going through his dead daughter's phone contacts to spread the word of her decease. I cannot imagine his agony and grief, that of a parent who outlives his child.

To end. This last instance of death is one I see before my eyes every day, but it is a case that puts one in the odd and paradoxical position of mourning the living, enduring a present absence, while mementoes of the fading personality surround one on all sides, his scribbled notes in the books he bought, the photographs he took, the papers he wrote, the house he designed. It is a literal living death, the death of the mind, the steady and merciless annihilation of the little grey cells that the aforementioned Poirot would not stop extolling, the premature expiration of a man's brain leaving behind nothing but a still breathing and stubbornly living body, relic of the remaining human machine that still needs feeding, and washing, and shitting, and pissing, and farting, and sleeping. Information imparted a minute before is faster forgotten than spoken. The house becomes an echo chamber as one repeats the same simple data over and over to little avail. You sense the soul within the cage stirring still, feeling the impulse to say something that can no longer be said. The need to communicate remains but the means are gone: the line is scrambled and the chasm widens; the void awaits and gapes.

Footnotes

[1]Armando Ianucci, 2017. The dictator dies and his lackeys pick up the mess he has left: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBeU7o6DODI

[2]Hermann Broch recounts the final day of the dying poet, in massive sentences whose beginnings are soon forgotten: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1966/01/06/uttering-the-unutterable/

[3]Novella by Thomas Mann, later a film by Luchino Visconti – though much maligned, the scene where Dirk Bogarde dies on the beach, in the act of reaching out to his beloved Tadzio, still packs a punch, maybe mostly thanks to the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony on the soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deUVrtC5_So

[4]Meryl Streep! Goldie Hawn! Bruce Willis! Isabella Rossellini! Death defied! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFXQQ2uAeHM

[5]Like the title says, He takes a holiday. In 1998 it was remade/reimagined as Meet Joe Black, which is discussed fairly dismissively in the main body of this essay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T86G_Vs9XAA

[6]Woody Allen film of 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESMIOnDD3Gg

[7]https://www.irishtimes.com/news/death-on-credit-by-louis-ferdinand-celine-trans-ralph-manheim-calder-13-99-in-uk-1.124639

[8]The late John Hurt stars in this 1997 adaptation of a novel by Gilbert Adair, with shades of the aforementioned Death In Venice, as Mark Kermode explains:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfS7MgUw0pY

[9]Some call it a '1000-page character assassination' – I think it's probably the best biography of an actor I've ever read – certainly the most unorthodox, the least fawning. Roger Lewis' book was made into a 2004 biopic starring Geoffrey Rush, the making of which is chronicled here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGTRVEjdqYo

[10]Thomas Malory's massive Arthurian saga from whence so many subsequent retellings of the legend have derived, be it Lerner and Loewe's Camelot, John Boorman's Excalibur or T.H. White's The Once And Future King. Here, Melvyn Bragg and others discuss: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWUHmvbEIEI

[11]A string quartet by Franz Schubert – but also a film by Roman Polanski starring Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxR1pHaMpcY

[12]From Gotterdammerung or Twilight of the Gods, the conclusion to Richard Wagner's huge Ring cycle wherein the hero Siegfried dies and is mourned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m9Xa4X-rvk

[13]From Wagner's Tristan and Isolde – the haunting love-death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLoHcB8A63M

[14]Pulitzer Prize winning Arthur Miller play about Willy Loman, much staged, much filmed, must be a big deal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsJhonpcetk

[15]It does what it says on the tin – it facilitates death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjQjIOk3o8g

[16]Michael Gambon and Sonia Braga star in Nicolas Roeg's 1995 film, a perverse chamber piece, which literally contains two deaths – though there may well be others too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvfBNoXzbLk

[17]The final short story from James Joyce's Dubliners, later John Huston's own cinematic swan song, which he directed from a wheelchair with the aid of an oxygen mask: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rkos62UPwVk

[18]Classic horror schlock from George Romero. Zombies defy death – they rise from their graves to stalk the earth,and have an insatiable appetite for the living: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H91BxkBXttE

[19]Oscar-baiting vehicle for Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-tLJ-OXN9I

[20]Nicole Kidman! Sam Neill! Billy Zane! On a boat! Tension! Orson Welles previously tried to film it under the title of The Deep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jO6UmoEg9SI

[21]Classic 1945 ghost story compendium, highlighted by Michael Redgrave's schizophrenic ventriloquist tormented by his dummy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86v2N-GffQM

[22]Kenneth Branagh attempts to be Hitchcock, costarring Emma Thompson and the late Robin Williams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5Yk0BGVSWg

[23]1988 David Cronenberg film starring Jeremy Irons in a memorable double role as twin gynecologists – they are 'dead ringers' for each other, and will die for each other too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlJ59tlex1U

[24]Not my cup of tea, but Peter Weir's film has bowled over many: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye4KFyWu2do

[25]The middle book in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy, following Molloy and preceding The Unnameable. I could find no satisfactory readings of Malone Dies online, so instead here is an ironical link to the very bloody death scene of yet another Malone, the Irish cop played by a typically Scotch Sean Connery, in Brian de Palma's The Untouchables – his death scene is truly that of a samurai and, even after some 45 bullets or so, he's still fit enough to crawl about and provide Kevin Costner with a pinch of crucial exposition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7h9cW_ZJMg

[26]One of many Hercule Poirot mysteries from Agatha Christie. Death rears its head over and over in her works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLul-S2d2cM

[27]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwAiKwnpwWI

[28]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcixEs-LETg

[29]Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions 1937-1952, p. 4 (Simon and schuster, 1964, translated by Ruth L.C. Simms)

[30]Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film, pages 236-40 (Faber and Faber, 1990, translated by Marianne Ruuth)

[31]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w9YrvJ8368

[32]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkVyav6dQg8

[33]Anthony Lane, Nobody's Perfect, pages 263-4 (Picador, 2002)

[34]Here, finally, belatedly, at long last, Death/Pitt leads Parrish/Hopkins into the hereafter. Those who were still awake by this point must have been considerably moved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INLV3v4jNtA

[35]https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Death_(New_Earth)

[36]The scene in question occurs around the 1:15:18 mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJkJ4PLFHUg

[37]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av1kCIdz0wk

[38]See also this scholarly article on the same subject, which is slightly out of date as it covers only the first two series, but still very comprehensive and compelling withal: https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2015/feature-articles/the-trip-as-mourning-comedy/