The conceit of Rachel Bloom's Death, Let Me Do My Special is right there in its title. The multihyphenate artist is performing her one-woman special to a packed theater, but "Death," played by David Hull, keeps interrupting from the audience. He knows she's been avoiding him, and Death doesn't like being ignored.
"Death is un-American," Bloom, who broke out with the brilliant musical comedy series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, laments. "Because in America we are all taught from a very young age to forget the bad, and focus on the good." But with each intrusion from Death, Bloom is encouraged to engage with him a little deeper – confessing her fear of her dog's eventual departure to the Rainbow Bridge and the quick succession of unexpected deaths she experienced during the early months of the pandemic, just after giving birth to her first child. She recalls how, right after learning of her friend and collaborator Adam Schlesinger's passing, she asked her psychiatrist what she should do. He told her: "All you can do is feel."
Obviously, artists have wrestled with mortality as long as art has existed. And as in life, people die on screen all the time, often excessively and without any narrative fanfare.
But death as a dramatic exploration, and as something that's real and sensed and understood, haunted my viewing experiences in 2024 more than other years in recent memory. Like Death in Bloom's special, it kept insisting on me, the audience, to reckon with it.
It's been … comforting?
Yes. As a dog owner and an agnostic, I deeply understand Bloom's anxieties around her pet's inevitable demise and the struggle to find meaning in death without faith in a god. On the other hand, I can't even begin to imagine what it's like to be a parent with a terminally ill child, like Julia Louis-Dreyfus' single mother Zora in Daina O. Pusić's Tuesday, an intense drama named for Zora's daughter, played by Lola Petticrew. Here, "Death" is animated rather than personified, a macaw (voiced with baritone gravitas by Arinzé Kene) who arrives at their home one day to bring Tuesday's suffering to an end.
Tuesday befriends Death – at one point they rap along to Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day." (This movie is as tenderly weird as it is emotionally devastating.) But Zora goes to extreme lengths to try to kill the parrot off, including swallowing him whole. Her response is relatable, but what's most striking is Tuesday's readiness to embrace Death, and how her deepest source of pain is Zora's refusal to do the same. Zora's denial has strained their relationship during a period where Tuesday needs her mother most.
There's a similar dramatic tension at work in Pedro Almodóvar's The Room Next Door and the unexpectedly profound blockbuster A Quiet Place: Day One, which both unabashedly present characters who wish to end life on their own terms. Almodóvar's film stars Tilda Swinton as Martha, a former journalist who's chosen to forgo further treatment for her terminal cancer and has purchased a pill that will end her life. She enlists the help of Ingrid (Julianne Moore), an old friend with whom she recently reconnected, and Ingrid agrees to be with her as she makes this final choice.
Almodóvar, adapting Sigrid Nunez's novel What Are You Going Through, adopts an on-brand wry and macabre sensibility to the whole affair; he pointedly juxtaposes Martha's matter-of-fact attitude and intricately detailed plan for death with Ingrid's initial shock, reluctance, and, finally, acceptance of her friend's decision. Ingrid might serve as the proxy for many of us in the audience, but Martha's determination is hard to argue with. "You can't be self-possessed if you're in agony," Martha confesses. (An adaptation of The Friend, another Nunez novel, is scheduled for release next year; it's about a writer grieving their friend and mentor's suicide.)
And A Quiet Place: Day One, a franchise prequel, is surprising and refreshing in its willingness to depict this still-taboo subject in its own way. At the movie's beginning, hospice patient Sam (Lupita Nyong'o) isn't quite as accepting about her circumstance as Martha in The Room Next Door; in fact, she's openly bitter. But the arrival of those gigantic murderous aliens presents her with a conundrum: Can she muster the will to survive the invasion, knowing she's already destined for a premature demise? Sam hangs on long enough to fulfill a dying wish – visiting a place that holds special meaning for her – and then sacrifices herself in order to help other survivors make it to safety away from the aliens.
While these projects are preoccupied with facing premature endings, others tapped into the nuances of aging and death. His Three Daughters beautifully reveals the small and big ways a dying parent can exacerbate fraught sibling dynamics and resurface old wounds. Likewise, A Real Pain depicts estranged cousins confronting the cracks of their relationship in the wake of their grandmother's death. Thelma presented a clever premise – nonagenarian June Squibb's title character is a victim of a phone scam and seeks revenge – to explore loneliness in the twilight years.
Michael Schur's comedy series A Man on the Inside echoes Thelma in series form; it stars Ted Danson as a recent widower who goes undercover to solve a theft at a senior living center, and winds up befriending the quirky residents. Death is never far from mind at the center; residents are here one day and gone the next, and it's a part of the natural rhythm of the place. But even in an environment where it's normalized, Schur makes it a point to show how our natural inclination is to pull away from others who are nearing the end, and how painful that can be. Aging, he's said, "is something that is seen as embarrassing or shameful, or something you should look away from, avoid, ignore, or pretend isn't happening."
Collectively, we're still reeling from the immense loss and effects of the pandemic in big and small ways, and frank depictions of illness, end-of-life care, and grief are all over our screens. The through line across these works is an emphasis on choice and autonomy in how we live and die, and how we respond to losing those people we love. As these performances show, having a choice about how and when to die is rare, and even the decisions that could be in our control are often inaccessible: The infrastructure is such that healthcare (both physical and mental) is denied or financially unattainable for many, and medical aid in dying for the terminally ill remains illegal in most states. (Martha in The Room Next Door considers this when laying out her plan for Ingrid, and takes pains to ensure her friend won't get in legal trouble after she's gone.)
A quote from the lovely animated movie The Wild Robot hit me especially hard this year: "Death's proximity makes life burn all the brighter!" exclaims a baby opossum, somehow wiser than many of us adult humans are on such matters. When we don't speak plainly about death, life becomes that much harder – at least, this is my takeaway from Death, Let Me Do My Special and all the rest. We deny ourselves the right to do what Bloom's psychiatrist advised after losing her friend: feel.
Copyright 2024 NPR
