Last breaths and exploring life’s end through popular film
When we watch death scenes in movies or on TV, they are often brutal
and horrific. Do most of us even flinch or think twice about what
we have just seen?
According to Daniel Johnson, MD, chief of the Palliative Care Department
at Kaiser Permanente, it seems that not many viewers are fazed
by the horrors of people dying in the films. This was the topic of the December
12, Arts
in Medicine lecture by Johnson, titled “Last breaths and exploring life’s
end through popular film.”
Most movies depict death with no social or personal context. Kids
see death on television or in a film and might get the message
that violence is painless – and justified.
During the lecture, Johnson showed clips from movies depicting
the nonchalance of death and dying, including Butch Cassidy and
the Sundance Kid
and Thelma and Louise.
In the final scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the train-robbing
outlaws burst out of their hiding place into a field of gunfire – knowing
they will die. However, the conversation they have only moments before their
death is not somber but light: “What have we got to lose – just
our lives?”
The same type of attitude is reflected in Thelma and Louise. The
once-normal, women-turned-criminals spend their last moments smoking
a cigarette and holding hands – and then drive off a cliff to escape
the police. A seemingly casual decision to “go all the way,” ending
their lives without trying to resolve any of the issues facing
them.
In other research on the glamorization of death in films, Jonathan
Hayes, MD, senior forensic pathologist in New York City’s Office of
the Chief Medical Examiner and a freelance writer, describes what ails us
as an “impairment of empathy of our ability to feel for others and to
respect them.” He blames the hardening of the American heart on the
glamorization of violence in music, movies, video games and television.
And while it would be simplistic to suggest that media violence alone has
the
power to make people act out their aggressions, it tends to blurs
the line between fantasy and reality.
There doesn’t seem to be an end to this trend. In fact, if you turn
on television any night of the week, a couple of the more popular and replayed
series are CSI and Law and Order, in which the entire theme is death – and
often times the most unusual kinds of death.
Johnson quoted Woody Allen who said “I don’t mind dying, I just
don’t want to be there when it happens.”
Maybe by the time we die, we will have been so desensitized that
we really won’t care.
The Arts and Medicine lecture series is held every Monday at noon
and can be seen in the Third Floor Lecture Hall, SOM and also in
Bushnell Auditorium in Building 500 at Fitzsimons campus in Aurora. For
more information,
visit http://www.uchsc.edu/artsinmedicine/lec.html
