Open Forum Friday: Death In Movies… Right or Wrong?
There’s a great article in The New York Times this week (found via DocumentaryFilms.net) about what they are calling “the respectable snuff film”. Eric Steel’s new documentary The Bridge presents real suicides caught on film from The Golden Gate Bridge, and has a lot of people upset and asking the question, “Where do we draw the line?” When is it okay to show death in movies, and when is it not? And just why are we so fascinated with it anyway?
The easy answer is that it’s okay to show death in a movie if it’s not real. But in this day and age, where you can see Iraqi beheadings and other atrocities with the click of a button over at sites like rotten.com or ogrish.com, have simulated deaths become too mundane for us? It’s true that within this current wave of horror films, one of the objectives seems to be about trying to make the deaths as grisly and realistic as possible. The recent announcement of a new installment in the notorious Faces of Death series also seems to be playing on the public’s fascination with images of real death.
The article mentions another intriguing documentary called Exit, about an organization in Switzerland that deals in assisted suicides for terminally ill patients. Need I mention that Clint Eastwood won multiple Oscars for the similarly-themed Million Dollar Baby only a few short years ago?
Clearly death is something we, as mortal beings, grapple with all the time, and it’s in our nature to explore all facets of it. But is there something wrong with watching another person’s death as some twisted form of education and/or entertainment? Does a movie like The Bridge have any redeeming value, or is it going too far? Would you want your own death to appear in a movie? Give us your thoughts here on Open Forum Friday.
Comments (3)
If the movie is good, then I think you can get away with alot. If people do not like the movie however, they will sit there and throw every cliché’d accuse out – including the too much gore argument.
You’re always going to offend some people, but if your movie is good it can get away with having plenty of violence and death. A movie like “The Bridge” will only be redeemed if it itself is an excellent movie. If you are going to show actual real deaths of real people in a movie you better do a fucking great job.
The other pole is when movies are so bad nobody cares about the amount of gore in them. Did anybody care about the insane number of deaths in “End of Days”? Not many.
Posted by Henrik on October 27th, 2006when it comes to something as subjective as film, it comes down to the context. there are many (too many if you ask me) absolutists out there who see no value in real or fake death whatsoever (yet will line up to watch Christ tortured and killed… but its different to them, also becasue of context ironically)
Posted by Goon on October 27th, 2006goldengatesuiciderate.ytmnd.com
interesting graph of suicides by location on the bridge.
Posted by Goon on October 28th, 2006Leave a Reply