Dying

As a Jewish kid in Nazi Germany, Michael Roemer, a filmmaker who went on to teach documentary at Yale (I took Charles Musser’s seminar a semester after Roemer left), had to lie in order to survive. In making the film, Pilgrims Farewell, he wanted to get as close to the truth as a human can. He didn’t want to lie anymore. He wanted to deal with the real thing. In making the documentary, Dying (1976), he realized that the people whom he documented as they were dying were more real that what he was going through in his family in New York. Artists and their families pay, he remarked decades later at Yale. “I neglected my family; I was always working. Once I started, I had to make the film,” he said after a presentation of the film on dying. “The people dying knew something we didn’t know,” he added. The prospect of death apparently makes things incredibly real, before they’re not.

The full essay is at "Dying."

Passengers

In line with the films, The Sixth Sense (1999) and The Others (2001), Passengers (2008) centers on the (hypothetical) question of whether the walking dead have to be convinced that they are indeed dead rather than still living. In all of those films, and even Ghost (1990), the dead who stick around as ghosts rather than immediately pass on to another realm have something to come to terms with, or work out. The astute viewer of these films is apt to wonder whether in the story-worlds of the films, as well as in real life, all that is going on is really just in the dying brain of the dead person, which is the case in Jacob’s Ladder (1990). We know that a dying brain secretes a hallucinatory hormone. As for whether there is even an actual afterlife, such a question is still beyond our reach, at least before death. I contend that Passengers hinges on whether the entire movie takes place in Claire’s mind. The answer hinges on the nature of the existence of the other characters who are dead. If they have their own agendas rather than are around to help Claire come to terms with the fact that she is actually dead—that she was on the plane that crashed with no survivors—then the film posits the existence of ghosts in our world rather than just in dying brains. The issue, in short, is existential and metaphysical.

The full essay is at "Passengers."

Eternal You: AI after Death

The documentary, Eternal You (2024), is one film that zeros in on the use of AI to contact loved ones who have died. As the marketing departments of the tech companies providing these products say, AI can deliver on what religion has only promised: to talk with people beyond the grave. Lest secular potential buyers be left out, AI can provide us with “a new form of transcendence.” Nevermind that the word, transcendence, like divinity and evil, is an inherently religious word. Nevermind, moreover, that the product is actually only a computer simulation of a person, rather than the actual person direct from heaven or hell. The marketing is thus misleading. In the film, a woman asks her dead husband if he is in heaven. “I’m in hell with the other addicts,” he answers. She is hysterical. Even though people who write computer algorithms cannot be expected to anticipate every possible question that AI could be asked and every response that it could give, government regulation keeping the marketing honest and accurate can significantly reduce the risk that is from AI’s use of inference (inductive) and probability that are beyond our control to predict and even understand. 

The full essay is at "Eternal You."

Realive: A Film About Extending Life Absent God

In 2016, Robert McIntyre, a graduate of MIT, became the first person to freeze and then revive a mammalian brain—that of a white rabbit. “When thawed, the rabbit’s brain was found to have all of its synapse, cell membranes, and intracellular structures intact.”[1] The film, Realive, made that same year, is a fictional story about a man with terminal cancer who commits suicide to be frozen and revived when his illness could be cured. In the context of McIntyre’s scientific work, the film’s sci-fi demeanor belies the very real possibility that cryogenics could realistically alter fundamental assumptions about life and death even just later in the same century. What the film says about the life and death is timeless, however, in terms of philosophical value.

The full essay is at "Realive."

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1. Candace Sutton, “Human Bodies Frozen in Desert Facility Waiting for Science to Wake them Up,” News.com.au.

Facebook’s Zuckerberg Donates $3 billion to Medical Science: Some Major Implications

Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced in September, 2016, that they would invest more than $3 billion during the next decade to build tools that can facilitate medical research on diseases. The first outlay of funds ($600 million) would create a research lab of engineers and scientists from the area’s major research universities.[1] “This focus on building on tools suggests a road map for how we might go about curing, preventing and managing all diseases this century,” Zuckerberg said at the announcement.[2] Moreover, the couple had previously announced a year before that they would give away 99% of their wealth over their lifetimes through the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative in the areas of education and healthcare. I would like to point out a few implications that may not be readily apparent.

The full essay is at "Zuckerberg Donates $3 Billion."

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1. Deepa Seetharaman, “Zuckerberg Fund to Invest #3 Billion,” The Wall Street Journal, September 22, 2016.

2. Ibid.

Little Women: Strong in Death and Love

Little Women (1994), based on the novel by Louisa May Alcott, can be thought of as a social history of civil-war-era New England—that is to say, the film captures what life must have been like on a daily basis. Yet the human predicament resonates and thus makes the film moving for viewers far removed from the world of the Marsh family in Concord, Massachusetts. In particular, the film confronts the viewer with the hard task of going on even with the emotionally heavy experience of loss.

The full essay is at “Little Women”

Subtle Anticipations in Film Narrative: Foreshadowing A Single Man

Tom Ford’s approach in screenwriting and directing his first feature film, A Single Man (2009), which is based on Christopher Isherwood’s novel of the same title, can be characterized as thoroughness oriented to the use of film as art not merely for visual storytelling, but also to probe the depths of human meaning and present the audience with a thesis and thus something to ponder. As Ford reveals in his oral commentary to the film, that thesis is that we should live in the present, attending to it more closely, because today might be our last day of life. George, the film’s protagonist, supposes that in intending to commit suicide at the end of the day—the film being confined temporally to it—he chooses the final day. Yet though an exquisite use of prefigurements—foreshadowings that subtly anticipate. Just as a film with a depth of meaning operates at different levels in the human psyche, the prefigurements in such a film should also be hung at different levels with care—and varying distance’s from the tree’s center. For such meaning is nuanced, or multivalent, rather than entirely opaque and transparent. In this essay, I take a look at Ford’s use of prefigurements to anticipate George’s death as an event that is finally unanticipated, at least from the standpoint of George’s plan to kill himself at the day’s end.

The full essay is at “A Single Man.”