In her blog about aging, Ronni Bennet has been posting a series about her mother’s death. Some of this I have seen on her Fotolog, but much was new. These posts are deeply personal but still have something to say for all of us.
Our society somehow manages to both ignore (or at least suppress) death while at the same time obsessively generating images of it on Film and TV and in the written media. Every action film, every crime thriller is filled with it, stylishly rendered into balletic action or gruesomely depicted with dismembered body parts and cartoon blood filling the screen. Look for example at the success of violent movies from the Wild Bunch onwards, or at the CSI franchise now all over TV screens. Generally such stylised deaths are anonymous – the victims’ only purpose is to die – crushed beneath the juggernaut of the storyline. We even use them as vehicles for humour.
For most of us though, when we meet with death it isn’t happening to some anonymous, faceless character or to some cartoon villain. It is happening to our friends, our children, our parents. It is immediate, painful, harrowing and often messy. When we use humour it is not to raise a laugh but as a defence against the truth. Sometimes it is the only way to tell the truth. This is in his way I think Pratchett’s message to us – death (sorry DEATH) is normal, death is banal. Philadelphia and La Traviata tackle death in different ways, facing it head-on
Sadly, such emotional honesty is too often missing from the depictions that fill our screens daily. We do not face death honestly by carving up bodies on screen. We face it by recognising the reality – as Ronni does.
