A Bloody Silly Way to Die

by Adam Nayman

I’m listening now to a song by the Wonder Years called “We Look Like Lightning.”  The song’s narrator is travelling in an airplane experiencing a bout of severe turbulence at thirty thousand feet.  With the kind of gallows humour that should be familiar to aerophobics and frequent flyers alike, he asks his seatmate, “What song do you want to die to?”

A person could make a pretty great and morbid mixtape out of Wonder Years deep cuts and B-sides: “Songs About Death” into “We Could Die Like This” into “I Just Want to Sell Out My Funeral.” Say what you will about the worlds we currently inhabit—physical, virtual, and all points in-between—but we’ve never been in such a position to curate our experiences in sync with our playlists.  The  much-abused phrase “the soundtrack of our lives” has become all-too-literal.  The second-most common way in which I use Instagram stories (trailing impromptu photos and videos of my daughters) is to screenshot whatever music I happen to be listening to at any given moment. It acts as evidence, I guess, of something abstract and interior, something that’s somehow both worth holding close to the chest and sharing with a thousand or so friends, acquaintances, and bots. Assuming that I continue using Instagram (or something like it) into the future (or what’s left of it), one of these frame grabs will end up being the last one; if not literally the song I die to, then close enough for posterity.

The original idea for this piece was to write a more or less straight review of Megalopolis—a movie, it turns out, that I’m considerably less interested in writing about than I originally thought. A few months out, the most endearing thing about Francis Ford Coppola’s monolithic vanity project is how its absolute and abject frontality as a drama of ideas—a Socratic methodology that emphasizes philosophical blatancy over subtext (the latter being, as we know, for cowards)—evokes for me Neil Breen and David Wain more readily than Abel Gance or Fritz Lang. Like my fellow middle-aged Dads in the The Wonder Years, I’m increasingly preoccupied with death these days—a spectre which abuts on my professional and private life. Megalopolis is thus most interesting to me in the context of its proximity to death: its self-consciously valedictory tone; its leveraging of Utopian ideals against apocalyptic pessimism; its dedication to Coppola’s late wife and longtime collaborator Eleanor, who died of Thymoma during production (and is represented in the film through Nathalie Emanuel’s Juliana Cicero); its positioning by critics and commentators as the latest (and most late-style) iteration of that old romantic warhorse, the Last Movie, solemnly (and pompously) eulogizing an invention-slash-art-form whose famous lack of a future is rushing up to meet us more swiftly than usual.

The parts of Megalopolis that I related to—and which I responded to, not so much apart from its riotous, semi-accidental comic flourishes but threaded through them—were the ones testifying to Coppola’s out-brief-candle-metaphysics. Meanwhile, the script’s various calls for revolution, reform and rebirth, struck me as laughable, which I suppose makes me a cynic and a realist and a hater.  Without necessarily trying to pick a side in the Megalopolis wars (such as they are), I agree with those (including Nick Pinkerton in 4 Columns) that the film’s problems stem not from some incoherence or craziness (qualities typically exalted by impressionable, hype-minded critics as shorthand for achievement), but Coppola’s pompous and impoverished rhetoric about our apocalypse-now moment and the artist’s responsibilities in resisting. It may be that principled idealism is the refuge of the young, and an octogenarian multi-millionaire cosplaying as philosopher king—one who looks and sounds like Adam Driver on his third or fourth card of blowhard auteur bingo—awakens my cynicism (which, it should be said, is already keeping me up most nights).

Insofar as Megalopolis was designed with an “interactive” component in mind, it could have been more interesting if audience members with realist-cynic-hater credentials had actually been allowed to pose mid-film questions via movie-theatre house mics to those IMAX-sized images of Adam Driver. Instead of asking Cesar Catilina about the future and whether or not we should fear its coming, I’d probably query him on whether he knows his name consists of two different kinds of salad dressing, or that he’s a fictional character in a movie that will yet manage, somehow and wholly to its credit, to go down in infamy in a moment where it seems like many people could truly not care less (or for less time) about the movies they see.

I do not know what song I want to die to: maybe “There is a Light That Never Goes Out,” which is about the ironic joy of beating the system, such as it is, and not dying alone (to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die), or “Our Life it Not a Movie or Maybe” (self explanatory). I want to think about it further, but then, I also don’t; while I don’t have a superstitious bone in my body, you don’t have to be a kook to grasp the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy.  However, I have considered that I might want to watch a movie on my deathbed, so that anybody left in my wake will be able to offer some variation on “Adam died the way he lived” at my funeral, which I really do hope to sell out (another way of saying that I hope the people that I love outlive me). The movie I’d probably want to watch on my deathbed, à la Edward G. Robinson in the  “thanatorium” sequence from Richard Fleischer’s dystopian Soylent Green (1973)—a painless expiration surrounded by video screens projecting nature footage beneath classical music—is, predictably for anyone who knows me,  Don’t Look Now (also 1973).  Beneath its occultish trappings and modish and decadent sense of dread—Nicolas Roeg’s peerless specialty, and my personal aesthetic sweet spot—is an instruction manual about coming to terms with the inevitable.

It’s hardly a novel reading of Don’t Look Now to grasp that its protagonist, the suavely haunted John Baxter (the newly late Donald Sutherland) is, in addition to being a grieving father, church restorer, and trench coat enthusiast, a kind of audience surrogate, a spectator-as-protagonist whose inability to analyze the various visual, aural and rhythmic motifs unfolding around him—signs and wonders strewn or submerged through the streets and canals of Venice—seals his doom. But of course John Baxter’s demise at the red right hand of that (in)famous death dwarf is inevitable. He was never going to avoid it anyway, because death is the sole shaping factor of Don’t Look Now’s fictive universe; not only is it the movie’s subject (on both a narrative and thematic level), but also embalmed in its structure, its subtext, its tactile and terrifying texture. The cinema is death at work, said Jean Cocteau, who’d surely appreciate the Orphean aspects of Don’t Look Now; the cinema is also made in our image  (our life is not a movie, or maybe).  

A cliche: when we die, our lives apparently flash before our eyes. When John Baxter dies, his existence replays as scenes—or single, subliminal, indelible frames—from Don’t Look Now. I’ve always thought it was a nifty trick that Roeg’s film omitted the opening and closing lines of Daphne Du Maurier’s short story—“don’t look now, but I think she’s trying to hypnotize you” and “what a bloody silly way to die”—while ultimately using them as guiding principles. The film’s mesmeric visual style creates and sustains the same churning, recursive dialogue between conscious and unconscious impulses that allows the John Baxters of the world (that’d be all of us) to variably fixate on and repress the things we don’t want to think about—like, say, the way that we’re all engaged, constantly and without reprieve, in a process of dying. And when the end comes, it is going to strike us as being pretty bloody silly—definitely not heavenly and, notwithstanding any sort of actual physical proximity, as in a car crash or a plane crash (from the ground, we look like lightning) not really by anybody’s side.

I’m all too aware that it’s several shades too romantic—and melancholic, and masochistic, and narcissistic, and all the other all-too-human sensations encoded and exploded via Don’t Look Now’s existential decoupage—to think that I’m going to ponder any of this at all in my last moments. I know it’s bloody silly to imagine myself waiting around for someone in the hospital, or at the hospice, or by the side of the highway, illuminated by the flashing signals of clustered emergency vehicles  (there is a light that never goes out) to ask, “What movie do you want to die to?”  I’d carry around my Blu-Ray of Don’t Look Now just in case anybody did ask, but in a pinch, it’d probably be easier to just log into the Criterion Channel on my phone or my laptop (as a lifelong freelancer, I’m pretty sure I’ll be lugging the latter with me as I shuffle off this mortal coil). 

Note that none of these fictive scenarios involve being around my kids, because, in all seriousness, I can’t joke about that, although I hope more than anything that they’re there as the alternative is more than I can bear; one way to see Don’t Look Now as a movie with happy ending is that a parent who has outlived his child doesn’t have to do it any longer. Maybe that’s why the only moment where I was moved by Megalopolis was the final sequence, in which our hero exercises his supernatural ability to freeze time on behalf of his newborn daughter, a stand-in for both Coppola’s multi-generational progeny and, I guess, the entire human race. Shot from below, through the underside of a plexiglass podium as her family basks in the adulation of Megalopolis’ grateful poor and dispossessed, the baby wriggles her way across the frame. The formalist in me wants to end this essay by saying that she looks like a benign descendant of Kubrick’s starchild—or maybe like the embryonic stain spreading across a glass slide in Don’t Look Now, a rough beast slouching towards Venice to be (re)born. The father in me understands that no matter what I end up watching at the end, I’m going to wish that I could just press pause.