POP STUFF: DEATH BECOMES US

On the 61st NYFF and a 2023 that brought a strange bounty of death at the movies

- Soleil Nathwani

DEATH IS THE LAST TABOO. From our early childhoods, religion, history classes or the passing of an aging grandparent conjure flights of angels, scenes of war or the memory of papery skin in a casket or on a pyre, but rarely do we actually discuss the reality. Former soldiers, often conscripted without regard for their morals, are left to fumble through the PTSD of post-war memories. When a family member has a long, lingering illness hushed rooms become the norm and a child's untimely death can be met with deafeningly quiet condolences. Suicide, the biggest taboo within the taboo, remains largely shrouded in the hypersilence of shame – unspoken despite the fact that more people take their own lives every year than die from car crashes. Paradoxically, we’ve made the things that leave the deepest scar the hardest experiences to share. Death is our only guarantee in life and yet it is the thing we won’t discuss around the dinner table, until we’re forced to confront it, like people groping in the dark.

Art shines a light in this darkness and while there’s no shortage of music, literature and painting that grapple with the truth of death and allow contemplation, cinema lags behind, tip toeing gingerly around real depictions of death and going whole hog into their caricatures. The movies have brought us bloodshed as sport à la Terminator and Kill Bill, war epics from Lawrence of Arabia to 1917, ghouls and horror galore from Carrie to Midsommar to