How Hollywood Killed Death
Illustration by Tom Gauld
ByALEXANDERHULS
April 18, 2014
New York Times
Death in the blockbusters of 2013 played out something like this:
“I’m scared, Spock,” Captain Kirk says to his hyperlogical space pal halfway through his four-minute death scene in “Star Trek Into Darkness.” It’s heavy. Eyes are brimming with tears. The score swells mournfully. Kirk dies. Spock yells. Cue confrontation with the bad guy, a spaceship destroying half of San Francisco and a huge climactic finale.
Another example: “I’ll catch you, I promise,” Tony Stark says to Pepper Potts, as she dangles precariously from a crane in “Iron Man 3.” Stark breaks his promise, and Potts falls to her death. The score swells. Eyes brim with tears. Cue confrontation with the bad guy, a cavalcade of C.G.I. explosions and a huge climactic finale.
Also: “I’m sorry,” Loki says to Thor as he lies dying, having sacrificed himself to save the universe in “Thor: The Dark World.” Eyes tear, score swells, Loki dies, Thor yells. Some moments later, cue confrontation with the bad guy, the destruction of the Old Royal Naval College in London and a huge climactic finale.
Blur your eyes, and they might have all been the same tedious, manipulative movie. I felt nothing watching these characters disappear off-screen, hurtling toward whatever lies beyond. I’m no sociopath. The problem is that death at the movies has died. The movie industry has corrupted one of cinema’s — if not all of fiction’s — most emotionally taxing moments into hollow formula, the kind of thing that passes in the blink of a plot point leading to a literal, if not figurative, explosive finale that takes up half the budget. Considering this, it’s odd that death’s killer is the new, risk-averse economic logic of Hollywood.
To be sure, part of the problem is that we’ve seen it all before. Of course action films have saccharine subplots that exist only to lend meaning to their staggering body counts. But in recent years, killing a major character in your average blockbuster has become inert thanks to the increasing use of formulas to create stakes. Take, for example, Blake Snyder’s wildly popular screenwriting guide, “Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need.” Snyder provides step-by-step instructions, as a Lego set does, on how to assemble the necessary 15 pieces of a movie, with each piece representing an important moment in a script (“Set-up,” “Midpoint,” “Bad Guys Close In”) that, when snapped together in the right order, builds the ideal movie. In Synder’s methodology, the death of a major character has a name: The “All Is Lost” moment. When a movie needs to convey a sense of “total defeat” forits protagonist and to its audience, Snyder prescribes administering “the whiff of death.” He writes, “Stick in something, anything that involves a death . . . [because it] will resonate and make that ‘All Is Lost’ moment all the more poignant.”
A Slate article from last year argued that Snyder’s formula has increasingly become dogma in Hollywood, rendering all blockbusters alike. Whether “Save the Cat!” is actually used by screenwriters or merely draws from the repetitive architecture of today’s tent poles is difficult to say. But it doesn’t matter. Filmmakers don’t seem to realize that plot mechanics are no shortcut to pathos.
It’s not unreasonable to expect emotional complexity from blockbuster films, nor is it impossible. Look at “Attack the Block” (2011), a quintessential blockbuster at heart (if not in budget or box office), in which each death — there are many — hits the viewer hard, because the filmmakers put in the effort to make sure it would. Think of some of the all-time greatest movie deaths: Obi-Wan Kenobi in “Star Wars.” Roy Batty in “Blade Runner.” Mufasa in “The Lion King.” Artax the Horse in “The Neverending Story.” Thelma and Louise in “Thelma & Louise.” Marion Crane in “Psycho.” Bambi’s mother in “Bambi.” Vincent Vega in “Pulp Fiction.” Spock in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.” Boromir in “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.” Tracy’s head in “Seven.” Maximus in “Gladiator.” Even something like Harry Stamper’s sappy demise in “Armageddon” — the most bombastic of blockbusters, a Michael Bay movie — plucked at a heartstring or two.
You don’t see that when Snyderian logic is at work in “Iron Man 3.” Potts’s death is a completely pro forma affair. Stark is given literally seconds to mourn before he is scooted right back into the action. It renders the moment so inconsequential, so blink-and-you’d-miss-it, that you can almost hear the writer’s pencil scratch, “Motivation for Iron Man to unleash hellfire and justify explosive C.G.I. bonanza” off the to-do list. How is an audience supposed to feel that a death matters when the movie doesn’t bother to lend it meaning? Writers are so focused on finding ways to give us crowd-pleasing destructive pyrotechnics that they undermine the required emotional setups without even realizing it. Death has become a mere transition device.
By contrast, Captain Kirk’s death at least aims for emotional resonance, lending it the full weight of its actors’ tears. Still, the moment is so transparently formulaic that its attempt to convince us of its gravity feels patronizing — all the more so because it’s impossible to believe it’s anything but a bluff. We know the “Star Trek” universe, so triumphantly rebooted, isn’t going to kill off its hero. It’s the worst kind of bluff: one so obvious, the bluffer can’t even commit.
That’s because neither Captain Kirk nor Pepper Potts actually dies (ditto Loki). These are not the routine fake-out deaths we’re used to: a character shot in the chest reveals a Kevlar vest, a drowned character bubbles up water after a few seconds of worry, a Batman explodes in a nuclear blast then resurfaces at an outdoor cafe in Italy. No, in 2013 characters were dead-dead, then . . . not so much.
Potts returns superpowered and totally fine; Kirk is resurrected by Khan’s superblood; Loki reappears, assuming the form of his father, Odin. It was a banner year for such Lazarus acts: Michelle Rodriguez died in the fourth “Fast & Furious,” only to come back alive, but amnesiac, in “Fast & Furious 6”; Patrick Stewart’s Professor X — who died in “X-Men: The Last Stand” — appears resurrected at the very end of “The Wolverine”; Tom Cruise dies in a gigantic explosion in “Oblivion,” but don’t worry, here comes a clone for the happy ending; “The Lone Ranger” kills off Armie Hammer early in the movie, digs him a grave and then has a white spirit horse that apparently resurrects him; then there’s Agent Coulson’s death in “The Avengers” which begot a television resurrection in 2013 on “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”
Formula may have atrophied death at the movies, but resurrection has killed it. And an unholy coalition between comic-book publishers and an economically weakened Hollywood is to blame.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that your local multiplex might as well be Comic Con. Amid rapid shifts in the media-buying public’s preferences, comic-book adaptations have proved incredibly lucrative for movie studios, practically becoming Hollywood’s main business model. They’re an ideal medium for an industry constantly looking for ways to tap into built-in audiences and spin out endless sequels. Comics are never-ending serials with decades’ worth of fans and stories to draw from, and Hollywood can build upon that, making its own serial stories and movies, creating loyal, invested audiences who will always show up. This has helped sequelitis shed its reputation as a symptom of creative bankruptcy, recasting it as ambitious world building.
Serialized storytelling isn’t the only thing that has made its way from comics to the movies. The timing of the rise of resurrection in blockbusters is no accident — it’s an inheritance. Along with the rise of superhero movies came comic books’ notorious revolving-door attitude toward death. Given the medium’s sprawling, practically interminable story lines, publishers like Marvel and DC Comics often need ways to bring major upheaval to their worlds. So they kill off major characters. Superman, Spider-Man, the Flash, Green Arrow, Green Lantern and Captain America have all died — at least temporarily. But Marvel and DC are financially dependent on characters that are too popular to leave dead. As a result, death to comic readers has become something of a joke: a tolerated pretense that means nothing more than a cash grab (buy the issue where Captain America dies!). A character’s demise allows the publisher to hype their resurrection (buy the issue where Captain America comes back!) or at least facilitate the sustained financial draw of a popular character.
Death is no longer just a transparent formula; it has been hybridized with something worse: Business strategy. There is no greater force in the world for wringing the passion out of human affairs than the desiccating logic of quarterly earnings reports. Of course, Hollywood has always been a business.
But unlike a strategically placed Pepsi product, killing death threatens to undermine the movie business’s reason for being.
Perhaps this loss might seem inconsequential — maybe even welcome — to some. After all, it’s easy to argue that we seek these escapist entertainments to avoid the preoccupations of everyday life — worrying about our mortality, for example. But movies like those in Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy — with their thoughts on the security state, terrorism and the power of mythology — prove that you can entertain audiences while actually commenting on the world we live in. No matter how much movies or comics depart into realities with superpowered beings, technologically advanced futures or fantastical worlds full of impossible creatures, they still need to do what all good stories should: Tell us something about being human. But most of today’s movies are telling us death doesn’t matter. And it’s hard to imagine a more inhuman observation than that.