Fake deaths, cheap resurrections, and dealing with real grief

[Saria Dragon of the Rain Wilds]

http://www.avclub.com/article/fake-deat ... l-g-210402

Five months ago, less than a week after her 24th birthday, my fiancée, Shanna, collapsed. No one knew it at the time, but a blood clot had broken loose from her leg and made its way into her lung. Once it was there, it did a number of things: It put pressure on her heart, dropping her blood pressure. It made it almost impossible for her to breathe. And, despite the best efforts of nurses and paramedics and ambulance drivers and ER doctors and a thousand desperate wishes since, by the time an hour had passed, it had killed her.

I was there for most of it. There, as she lay on the floor, scared but fighting, while I held her hand and mopped her brow and told her to breathe for me. There when the paramedics fought to keep her conscious and alert. There, with her family, when the emergency room doctors were finally forced to concede that no amount of CPR would make her heart beat again. There when they declared her dead, my partner, my love, my best friend.

I won’t try to describe how much it hurt, or how much I miss her, or how much beauty and art and love the world has lost. If you’ve never experienced the sudden death of a person who was a cornerstone of your life, it’s not something you can really imagine—and why would you want to? And if you have, then you already know.

So I’ll just say that I spent the summer of this year in near-constant agony, desperate for any distraction from the thoughts and memories—some wonderful, some awful, all painful—constantly flowing through my head. Netflix was my constant companion—I would stream Futurama or Bob’s Burgers all day and well into the night, watching numbly until I was finally tired enough to cry myself to sleep. The worst moments of the day were in the shower, or when the house’s spotty Internet cut out, and I was left alone with my thoughts.

I began to notice that my reactions to pop culture had changed, in some ways drastically. I picked up a nasty aversion (which has lessened over time) to ambulances or heavy breathing, both of which could send me into memory-tinged panic attacks. Podcasters making jokes about strokes or embolisms would force my hands into fists. But more than that, I became horribly conscious of death in the media I consumed, and how often it was employed as a plot device for cheap effect.

I really wanted to like Guardians Of The Galaxy. By the time I went, alone, to the theater to see it, my grief had subsided to the point that I was essentially functional, and I was looking forward to what everyone was saying was the most fun movie of the year. But within minutes of the start of the film, I found myself angrily weeping, thanks to an opening scene that desperately tried to inject pathos into a movie that didn’t need or warrant it.

It’s not really Guardians’ fault—dead and dying parents have been a motivating trope since people first started writing down stories. But the movie’s opening, with young Peter Quill failing to say goodbye to his dying mother, is still blatant, gross manipulation of its audience, and, sitting in that theater with tears streaming down my face, I found myself getting pissed off. Having death shoved in my face in the first minutes of what was supposed to be a vacation from the **** reality of my life tainted the entire movie-going experience, and suddenly, I couldn’t help but see every subsequent moment of the film—the weirdly bloodless combat, the plot-mandated sudden sad revelations that occurred like clockwork every 15 minutes, the perfunctory killing off of the supporting cast—as bald manipulation by people who didn’t understand what sorrow really was, or that death wasn’t just a plot device but a real thing, hideous and ever-present. The movie has a body count in the hundreds, but none of those deaths mattered, because no one involved with the thing had any respect for death as anything but a beat in the plot.

I’ve become a death elitist in the last few months. I watch actors, analyze scripts, judge the editing and the pacing of death scenes, try to gauge whether anyone involved has a real understanding of grief. The PG-13 rating, which divorces death and violence from blood and consequences, has become my nemesis. It’s not that everything needs to be drab or morose—by all means, Sterling Archer can and should go on as many rampages as he likes—but when a show or movie asks me to feel a death, it had better take it seriously. Nicholas Meyer killing Spock at the end of Wrath Of Khan works, because the characters, and the movie itself, treat it as real. Contrast that with the cowardly handling of Kirk’s “death” in Star Trek Into Darkness, with J.J. Abrams and crew milking the moment for fake emotion while desperately foreshadowing that everything’s going to be okay. For Abrams and his writers, death is little more than a screenwriter’s tool to evoke emotion, and that cavalier attitude toward one of the universal human experiences makes everything about his film feel hollow.

Worse, it trivializes the most terrible aspect of death: Its permanence. I will never see Shanna again. Never hold her hand, kiss her, talk to her. We’ll never sit next to each other, laughing and fighting our way through Spelunky, stealing kisses between levels. I will spend the rest of my life without her, and there is no hope of reprieve. And so, when I watch or read about a character being reunited with their lost love thanks to a fortuitous twist of plot, it fills my stomach with acid.

The point of the Orpheus myth is that Orpheus fails. He does everything he can, moves heaven and Earth, and in the end Eurydice stays dead. So when a man in fiction (and it is almost always a man, because there’s nothing as good for motivating a male character like killing off the woman he loves) earns his beloved’s resurrection through hard work or good deeds, it’s a slap in the face to all of us in the real world who would give anything and everything to have the people we need back. The worst offender I’ve encountered in recent years is the conclusion to Lev Grossman’sThe Magicians trilogy, which ends with protagonist Quentin Coldwater being reunited with his dead love, Alice, as, essentially, a reward for growing out of his adolescent neuroses. It’s a nasty betrayal for a series that has, until then, ably explored magical worlds without engaging in magical thinking. (It’s made even worse by Alice’s resurrection used as a metaphor for coaxing a loved one out of depression or mental illness, which is an ugly, nasty idea in its own right).

I’m not immune to the lure of escapism. Scott Pilgrim’s resurrection-by-1-up will always be one of my favorite comic gags. But when stories ask me to feel and care about a character’s death, and then reverse it by magic, the authors have gone beyond wish fulfillment. They’ve shown that they have no understanding of the truth of what they’re writing about. And without that truth, their art can never be anything more than a shallow reflection of life.

Some of this anger will fade with time, I know. Years from now, when the pain is just a dull ache, I’ll be able to read comic books and watch movies treat death like an open window or a revolving door with no ill will. But for now, I can only see it as a solid barrier, stopping me from having the one thing I need most in the world, and that terrible power must be treated with respect. I love you, Shanna, and I miss you.

[Random User]

I'm mostly fine with the whole reuniting thing, but I do understand where he's coming from with the cheap death/resurrection thing. I absolutely hate it when writers decided "but what if they was not kill" was the best plot device for a happy ending. I personally think that it serves no point other than detracting from the quality of a film or whatever other media you can think of purely for the sake of the audience feeling better, and it's something writers should stay away from a little more, imo. I mean, sometimes there are believable "resurrections" that fit in nicely with the plot, but usually not.

I think a lot of the problem is people don't like the permanence of death. A lot of people would rather pretend that it doesn't exist. On the contrary, I think people really need to realise how easily life can take you. Sometimes I think people subconciously forget that people die all the time and that it can happen at any moment. I try to always bear that in mind, because when someone I care about dies, I don't want to have been under the misconception that they were supposed to live longer.

[ScottyMcGee]

This guy should read the Game of Thrones novels.

[Apollo the Just]

I never realized that that trope really bothers me until now. I couldn't articulate it but there have been so many recent movies/other works where PERSON U THOT WAS DEAD RLY WASNT YAY. It's gotten to the point where when I see a death taken seriously in a work, I spend the rest of the movie going "yeah ok but they're going to come back so whatever" and am honestly surprised when they actually remain dead.

Not gonna lie. It ruined [[[really huge HTTYD2 spoiler]]]
[spoiler]Stoick's death for me in HTTYD2. Because this trope is so entrenched in media, I was fully expecting it to be played straight in this movie and for Stoick to MIRACULOUSLY RECOVER; to the extent that his death and memorial were almost done before I realized that it was actually a real thing. I see this crappy trope so much that I didn't expect death to actually be taken seriously and respectfully the way it actually was.[/spoiler]

[ScottyMcGee]

There's a really good video on youtube I saw years ago about the Death and Return of Superman and how it started superhero death in comics. Elijah Wood and Mandy Moore are in it.

Oh - here it is!

[MEDIA=youtube]0PlwDbSYicM[/MEDIA]

[Apiary Tazy]

The ol' "Dead but not really" gambit.

I think I agree that it's mostly used as a drama piece that is put back to give the main character a happy ending.

It depends on the subject matter but there's tons of examples where it's done so poorly that even the most enthusiastic fan rolls their eyes.

[Deepfake]

I think it's probably more abrupt for folks who are not used to seeing the cliches and the obvious handwaviness of most pop-culture writing in mainstream media. I was fully aware of most of it, and already hated the lot of it, as a younger person, before I experienced the loss of a loved one core to my life. In that sense, there was no new awareness, pop-culture media had always been on a downward trend ever since it both began accepting more self-influence and since a lot of what was 'good' was so recently made, much of the good media had to be replaced with whatever else writers could come up with. Weirdly, my subconscious did taunt me with the resurrection of my friend through dreams, only to experience the same loss when I woke in the morning, although I've largely attributed that to him contacting me in some way.

[QUOTE="Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way, post: 1493909, member: 30977"]I never realized that that trope really bothers me until now. I couldn't articulate it but there have been so many recent movies/other works where PERSON U THOT WAS DEAD RLY WASNT YAY. It's gotten to the point where when I see a death taken seriously in a work, I spend the rest of the movie going "yeah ok but they're going to come back so whatever" and am honestly surprised when they actually remain dead.

Not gonna lie. It ruined [[[really huge HTTYD2 spoiler]]]
[spoiler]Stoick's death for me in HTTYD2. Because this trope is so entrenched in media, I was fully expecting it to be played straight in this movie and for Stoick to MIRACULOUSLY RECOVER; to the extent that his death and memorial were almost done before I realized that it was actually a real thing. I see this crappy trope so much that I didn't expect death to actually be taken seriously and respectfully the way it actually was.[/spoiler][/QUOTE]
HTTYD2 really derailed itself by not mourning at all, though. More importantly, it commits the same crime by saying 'Your mother never died, dragons never hurt anyone at all, especially not all of the people who are now missing limbs and other family members.' - The first movie works because it feels that heavy weight and all of their people's history is against them accepting dragons as allies. When Stoick dies and stays dead, it shows the writers as self-contradictory, that they will visibily kill a character in a permanent fashion but use any loophole possible to bring another back simply to setup this weak story arc. More importantly, they're trying to use her as a shortcut. Previously, Hiccup was forced to learn and discover the secret nature of dragons, but now they're just writing that important step of a new discovery out of the plot. The mother character exists not because she is an important character to the plot, but she is important to bypassing plot.

I believe there are completely acceptable ways to bring a loved character back, but it takes much better writing than what we're given. It has to be a fixation of the plot, though, not something written in because their death was inconvenient.

[ScottyMcGee]

I saw the trope too early on, but recognized it more of a marketing thing, to just continue making money. I mean if Superman and Batman and all those flagship heroes really did die then the companies who owned them wouldn't know what to do next. I guess supeheroes carry on the mantle to another hero but--I dunno. It wouldn't feel the same since they did so much with the original character. They do that with Doctor Who but Doctor Who's death and regeneration is different - it's sci-fi based. Different personalities but same memories.

If you want to see death treated more respectfully, it will mostly be in literature, where writers who write for a living put more thought into things. But TV and movies and visual media will always trample it.

[Random User]

It's unfortunate that marketing has to get in the way of decent writing, though.

[Deepfake]

I'd be fine with them killing Superman or Spiderman or Anyman, honestly. Just do it when you're gonna reboot the series anyway, since they love doing that crap.

[ScottyMcGee]

Speaking of Spider-man, I dunno how much any of you are into comics but:
[spoiler]
Recently they decided to "kill off" Peter Parker officially in The Amazing Spider-man series. Long story short, Doc Ock transfers his consciousness into Parker's body, so now Parker is in Doc Ock's dying body. Doc Ock witnesses Peter's death in Doc Ock's body, and Peter tries to give some final advice to Doc Ock, hoping he will really be Spider-man. Doc Ock has an identity crisis, where he now feels regret and actually sees himself as Spider-man, replacing himself as Peter in Peter's memories.

It was a really interesting concept and I liked it/was disturbed by it at the same time. They started a new series called Superior Spider-man, where Doc Ock is now Spider-man.

OF COURSE. . . Peter Parker's unconscious self is still dormant inside his brain, witnessing Doc Ock be a terrible Spider-man. I stopped reading halfway, but they stopped Superior Spider-man and now Peter's back in a new, re-numbered Amazing Spider-man series.

I don't think it became that big of a deal anyway and nobody gave a hoot.
[/spoiler]