Death
is a fact of life that is inevitable. There’s a 100% failure rate in people
that have tried to live forever. No matter how important or rich a person is,
death makes us all equal in the end. America refuses to believe this.
What
with such popular trends in the media telling us to “live while we can” and new
advances in medicine allowing us to live just
a little bit longer, Americans, it would seem, cannot and will not grasp
the concept that at some point they will depart from this life here on Earth.
Death, I think most can agree, is a concept that most do not want to hasten.
Why think about dying when one can think about living forever? Hollywood films,
like Beetlejuice (especially Beetlejuice), would rather people laugh
at death, which most are more than willing to do.
Beetlejuice, a story of ghosts and the
after-life, would appear at first to be a movie about accepting death as just
another phase of life, and that death is not the end-all-be-all that people
believe. Yet, I believe it does not accept death at all. It wants to sugar-coat
it and say that people will just come back as ghosts, and it will be the same
as life – waiting rooms and all. Take the Maitlands, for instance. They had no idea they were dead until they
started experiencing weird things and found the manual called Handbook for the Recently Deceased.
Their only conflict throughout the movie was scaring the Deetse’s out of the
house so that they could continue living in it and work on the model city. Even
at the end of the film they are helping Lydia with her school work and
continuing to live their lives as before.
I do not know if Burton
did this intentionally or not, but in one scene Mrs. Maitland tries to scare
Mrs. Deetse by in a closet by tearing off her own face. Mrs. Deetse bats her
out of the way, a symbolic moment of how the Deetse’s do not think about death.
In Beetlejuice, Tim Burton makes one thing clear: death, in all its
forms, is something Americans want to ignore.
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Yes Charles! I definitely see your point. I think that Tim Burton did consciously contradict his movie’s theme. Perhaps Burton felt that if he made a blatant contradiction of what people thought would be a movie about accepting death, then his point about America really hating to accept death would be more prevalent. I do sometimes however question whether or not all Americans have the problems with accepting death that some do. I think Burton’s film might, at times, be inaccurate concerning Americans feelings about death. Maybe rather than a comment on American society he is speaking more of Christian society. I feel like the majority of deathly fears, which are attributed to Americans’, manly stem from Christian based religions. Although the majority of America is Christian, the whole country is not. I would be interested to find out if Americans who identify with religious denominations other than Christianity have the same fears of death that Americans who are Christian have.
ReplyDeleteThe subject of death really digs down to the core of what people believe, so I will share my take as it relates to yours. Reading this post made me smile a bit.
DeleteI just think what you say is seriously interesting because of what I just posted on my own blog. It relates to how I was saying that people fear death because most people DON'T believe in an afterlife, and they are afraid of that insignificance and blankness. On the flipside, and please correct me if I'm wrong, it seems like you are saying that people in America are afraid because they DO believe in an afterlife, and they are terrified of a Christian hell. It's kind of cool because even though our ideas seem juxtaposed, in essence, they say something very similar.
Also, this might be interesting, the only reason that I am truly unafraid to die is because I am a Christian. I don't get that stereotypical feeling that I'm running from hell. You'll find that true Christians, who try to imitate Christians from the bible, are always looking up rather than down.
Also, I agree with you and Charles' idea bout Burton intentionally contradicting himself is a really good idea.
Taylor Mroski
Your mention of media portrayal on how to live longer, as well as advances in medicine, started a little train of thought that I think I will share. We have the media telling us to avoid things, too, like smoking. It kills us, and yet we ignore that. A third of Americans smoke daily and just try to forget about how terrible it is for them. People do all kinds of stupid things that could kill them and don't think twice. I don't know why we choose to go base jumping and diving and alligator wrestling in relation to how we feel about death.
ReplyDeleteWhen I go rock climbing, I always find myself thinking, "Man, I could die up here if something were to go wrong." After a few minutes though, I'm able to put it out of my mind saying "I could die, but that's a risk I take." Another person might just say "nothing is going to happen to me."
It's the difference in motives that sort of gets me thinking about these kinds of things. My question is this: is the fact that we don’t think of death out of an acceptance of its reality, or a denial that we will die at all?
--Taylor