I went into my viewing of Final Destination: Bloodlines not having seen a single frame of any of the franchise entries in over twenty years, only being familiar with the first one from early high school sleepovers and having seen the opening (and only the opening) of the first sequel when it first hit Blockbuster shelves. Watching this one prompted me to go down a rabbit hole of watching the entire series over the course of a week, and although I wouldn’t say that binge retroactively gave me more appreciation for this one necessarily, I do think that it moved up in my rankings for a latecomer entry into an almost abandoned franchise.
Back in the 1960s, young Iris (Brec Bassinger) has just learned that she’s pregnant, on the eve of a big date with her boyfriend Paul, who has managed to score reservations for a night at a recently completed Space Needle-style restaurant. Despite some difficulties getting in, the two still have a romantic time together, and Paul proposes to her while the two stand on an outdoor observation deck. Things quickly take a turn for the worse when a penny tossed over the side of the building by an unattended child gets sucked into the restaurant’s vents, creating a chain reaction that cascades from a shattered glass dance floor to an explosion of various gases to an elevator collapse to the destruction of the stairs. It’s bad. Iris manages to be the second to last to die, protecting herself and the young son of the venue’s lounge singer until the very last moment, when she dies (followed, presumably, by the kid). This turns out to be a premonition, however, and she manages to save a huge number of people from dying by getting them off of the dance floor before it collapses, and getting everyone evacuated.
If you’re familiar with this film franchise’s (very loose) mythology, then you know that this means that Death personified is now pissed that its “design” was cheated, and it will now seek out and kill everyone who survived, in the order they “should” have died. This film adds a new wrinkle, however. Due to the large number of survivors, many of them went on to have children and start families, all of whom only exist because the plan was diverted, which means that Death has to prune the entire family tree of each survivor before moving to the next person on its list. It’s taken decades to tick off every box, and now the last remaining branches from the Space Needle survivors are Iris’s children and grandchildren, which is where we pick up in the present. College student Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) keeps having the same nightmare, about a woman named Iris saving dozens of people from a building collapse. Theorizing that the woman in her visions may be her estranged grandmother, she goes home to her father and brother, Charlie (Teo Briones), and while the reception from her father is warm, Charlie gives her the cold shoulder, clearly seeing a similarity in Stefani’s distance from her family and their earlier abandonment by their mother, Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt). Stefani’s father tries to warn her not to start asking questions about Iris, citing that she had made the lives of both her children, Darlene and Howard, miserable. Although she adjusted to her life after the near disaster initially, she later became obsessed with seeing “patterns” and was preoccupied with thoughts of death, and her seemingly unhinged protectiveness warped both of her kids.
Ignoring him, Stefani immediately goes to the home of Uncle Harold, where we meet the cousins. Erik (Richard Harmon) is the eldest, a tattoo artist with his own extensive body art and piercings, with prim high school athlete Julia in the middle and fully grown adult man Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner) rounding them out as the apparent youngest despite being, as noted, a grown ass man (they put him in a lot of oversized sweaters and backwards caps, but the effect isn’t convincing so much as it is confusing). I think we’re supposed to believe that Charlie and Bobby are about the same age, but it doesn’t work. When Uncle Harold kindly but firmly rejects Stefani’s questions, her aunt indirectly points her in the direction of a box of family records, which Stefani uses to locate the last known location of Iris, a bizarre fortress that Iris has constructed for herself and meets her grandmother. She learns about the family history and is given a book that traces the history of all of the restaurant disaster survivors and their descendants, revealing that Iris is apparently the last, and that once she’s dead Death will track down Howard and his progeny in order, followed by Darlene and her two kids. As is always the case, no one believes Stefani at first, but as more deaths occur around them, the remaining Campbells must try and work together to see if there’s a way to get off of Death’s list.
Where the film is weak is in its main character. Stefani is kind of boring, and you’re never really all that invested in her success. I don’t normally like to denigrate performers in these reviews, but Santa Juana brings very little to the table. Looking at her filmography, she’s only ever been in a couple of episodes of The Flash and the few film credits she has are for movies that aren’t even notable enough to have Wikipedia pages. On stage, she was the understudy for a role in a Canadian production of Dear Evan Hansen, and “understudy” is exactly how I would describe her performance. It’s like the studio saw the success of the two most recent Scream sequels and said, “Get us a Melissa Cabrera type,” and she just happened to fit the visual mold that they were seeking. I’m not trying to be mean, but it’s hard to believe that she auditioned for this role rather than being selected based solely on her headshot. It doesn’t help that Stefani is one of the more underwritten characters from this franchise. For the first time, our main character isn’t the person who had the death premonition at the top of the screenplay, but is just related to them, so she never even gets to have any establishing character moments of her own as she tries to save people from disaster. Everything happens to her, not because of her, and it would have taken a stronger performer to wring a little more pathos out of a character who seems to have been underwritten on the page from the start. Compare her to Briones, playing her younger brother, and although he isn’t given much more to do than huff teenagerly when his big sis comes home after what feels like a long time away and doesn’t even seem to care that much about catching up, he’s giving a solid performance even when the material is underwhelming.
Overall, though, this one is pretty fun. In my overview of the previous installments, I noted that my friend called Final Destination a franchise where “You get exactly what you expect in a nice way,” and this one is no exception. The things that you want from a Final Destination movie are present: a harrowing opening scene, a bunch of people being snuffed out via Death’s contrived coincidences, an appearance from Tony Todd to explain the rules, a last-minute aversion of death that lulls the remaining survivors into a false sense of security, and a mean ending. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. What this film does, like Final Destination 5, is introduce some new elements to the lore that work in its favor. That all of Death’s victims here are the descendants of previous intended victims who were able to stay out of harm’s way for a time is interesting, and there’s a particularly fun twist with regards to a character who seems utterly screwed but who ends up being fine because they were never actually on Death’s list in the first place. It works.
Brandon texted me a couple of weeks ago to ask if I would be interested in writing about Final Destination: Bloodlines, and I admitted that I hadn’t even planned on seeing it, as I had only seen the first movie years and years ago at a sleepover and hadn’t seen any of them since (although I, like almost everyone on Earth, was familiar with the log-truck opening of the first sequel). This surprised him, as my fondness for Screamand my almost academic interest in the post-Scream teen horror boom is something that has come up often around these parts. Looking back at the franchise, the release years perfectly overlap with the most academically rigorous years of my life, which explains why I never paid much attention to the franchise. I have a very good friend who was very interested in seeing Bloodlines, however, and I did ultimately see it in theaters after several attempts to plan an outing. I’ll be doing a full review of that one, but I didn’t feel fully qualified to do a write-up on it with so little familiarity with the series (despite its largely self-contained nature), since I also didn’t really foresee that I would get the chance to binge all of the others in order to make the most informed review possible. But something else bigger than me had a plan all along … and within six days of seeing Bloodlines, I had seen all five of the previous Final Destination entries. And I have thoughts.
Final Destination (2000)
There’s something legitimately special about this one. I already knew before going into it that this began life as an X-Files spec script, with Alex (Devon Sawa)’s character having initially been planned to be the younger brother of FBI agent Dana Scully. On the show, Scully is specifically noted to have three siblings: sister Melissa and older brother Bill Jr., both of whom appeared in four episodes in the present and a few others in flashbacks, and Melissa is mentioned frequently outside of her actual appearances. Younger brother Charles never appears in the present and, in Jeffrey Reddick’s initial script, occupied the role that would become Alex. The narrative of the film follows Alex as he has a premonition of a terrible air disaster occurring on his class trip to Paris, and his pursuant panic results in him being kicked off of the flight with several other students and a teacher: his nondescript best friend Tod, orphaned sculptor Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), class bully Carter (Kerr Smith) and his girlfriend, goofball Billy (Seann William Scott), and Miss Lewton (Kristen Cloke). As a result of this, he and the others are stated to have “cheated Death’s design,” which means that Death is now coming for all of them, as Alex tries to figure out if there is a way to get off of Death’s list permanently.
I watched this one last during my binge, as my buddy who wanted to watch the movies with me said we should skip to the second as we had both already seen the first, which ended up working out well, since Final Destination 5 is actually a stealth prequel that leads into the the events of this one. It also meant that I had already seen where the franchise was going before returning to the original text, which gave some insight into how this formula would be adapted and recycled. The film franchise that most came to mind as a result was not another horror series but the Mission: Impossible movies. As with those movies, this initial outing is in a genre that the other films aren’t necessarily. The first M:Iis a spy thriller that focuses mostly on spycraft and espionage but which happens to include a couple of major action sequences, notably the Langley heist (where Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt descends into a computer room to steal information) and the big train-set finale that includes a helicopter crashing into a tunnel. The later M:I films are really only spy movies in the broadest sense of the term, and could be more accurately defined as action adventure films that happen to include international intrigue. Every film after the first exists first and foremost as a vehicle to deliver high-octane stunt spectacle, with the “spy” elements only being present to the extent that they are needed to provide a scaffolding on which the action hangs. Likewise, Final Destination is structured as a mystery with the trappings of a horror movie, one that happens to have a singular Rube Goldbergian death in it (Miss Lewton’s), and which is more interested in the question of why these people are marked for death and acting as a somber meditation (as much as a mainstream horror film from the turn of the millennium could be) on survivor’s guilt. It’s not a top-tier Scream-era teen horror, but it’s solidly second rung given the care that went into it. As a franchise, the following Final Destination movies are structurally identical; the lead character has a vision of horrible death, they manage to save others from impending doom, and the survivors then find themselves marked for death and die off in a particular order while they try to figure out a way to avoid dying, all of their deaths being horrific. Like the M:I sequels, the FD sequels take the most memorable element from the first film—Ethan Hunt doing something nearly superhuman in the former and the complicated domino-falling deaths of the survivors in the latter—and then make that gimmick the primary selling point. The stories in the films that follow put more effort into the complexity of the deaths than into the narrative drive or character motivation … and that’s fine, honestly. The “Every movie is essentially the same but come see how complicated the machinery of death is” approach is a perfectly legitimate marketing strategy, since, as a friend of mine put it, “You get exactly what you expect in a nice way.”
The fingerprints of The X-Files are still all over this thing, if you’re familiar enough with the series. First time director James Wong was a producer on the series and wrote seventeen episodes of it (most, if not all, with writing partner Glen Morgan), largely within the first couple of seasons (including “Beyond the Sea,” the episode that first introduced Scully’s family). Coincidentally (or not?), I caught a rerun of the season two episode “Die Hand Die Verletzt” on Comet a couple of weeks ago and there were a lot of elements of it that I saw in Final Destination. That episode focused on teenagers at a high school dealing with a tragedy, a dark force that was claiming them and other members of the community, and a lot of Vancouver forest night shoots that featured lightning almost-but-not-quite killing people. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that this one was one of many episodes co-written by Wong and Morgan. There are also moments scattered throughout the film in which I could detect the influence of characters from the series speaking through the characters in the film, with Daniel Roebuck’s FBI character reciting dialogue that I could hear Scully saying. The overall somberness of the proceedings is really what makes this one both stand out as a film and feel like part of the X-mythos.
Opening Disaster: Despite being the original, this is not the best opening sequence, but it’s still a strong start. I’ve seen parts of this sequence an uncountable number of times, given the number of movies I’ve seen over the years that were released on DVDs that loved pitching the idea of expanding your home media collection based on the presence of special features. I’m fairly certain that every single New Line Cinema release had the same advertisement, that promised “behind the scenes looks” at special effects, playing over clips from this scene. With air disasters being relatively low in the two decades following the film, this one became less scary over time before the recent ongoing spate of crashes and other issues in the past few years make this one frighteningly plausible once again. We’re all watching The Rehearsal, right?
Best Death: It has to be Miss Lewton, although this could be considered the franchise’s “original sin” as far as what the series would devolve into. Special mention has to go to Tammy getting flattened by a bus mid-sentence as well.
Worst Death: Billy Hitchcock is barely a presence in this film, only appearing when a scene needs Carter to bully someone other than Alex for a while. His death is also the most forgettable, as he’s decapitated by a shard of debris after a train smashes Carter’s car.
MVP: Devon Sawa is undoubtedly giving this his all, and I really like him here. He was trying to distance himself from his image as a teen heartthrob at the time by taking on “weirder” roles, as in this and in Idle Hands. Special mention has to be made of Tony Todd, however, as he makes his first appearance here as Bludworth, the mortician who “explains” the rules of Death’s design, such as they are.
Spot the Battle “Star”: In a break from my normal Star Trek obsession, it’s worth mentioning that I noticed an actor from Battlestar Galactica in (practically) every one of these films. Alessandro Juliani appears in an extremely minor role as a street musician in Paris in the film’s epilogue scene. He’s been in tons of stuff, but I know him best as Lt. Felix Gaeta. I met Juliani at a GalaxyCon in 2023 and he was very nice!
Final Destination 2 (2003)
Right off the bat, this film feels cheaper than its predecessor. The opening credits of all of these movies range from good to excellent, with later entries going into full-blown 3D glass breaking and x-ray recreations of the films’ various fatalities. This one opens in the bedroom of Kimberly (A.J. Cook) as the camera pans around in the semi-darkness, occasionally settling on the TV that’s playing an interview with a conspiracy theorist obsessed with the previous film’s Flight 180. This got a theatrical release, but from the first frame, it feels like a sequel in a franchise making its leap from cinemas to the direct-to-video market; it’s all very Lifetime. Luckily, from there, we move fairly quickly to the franchise’s defining scene, Kimberly’s premonition of a massive highway pile-up that occurs as the result of an unsecured load on a log truck. This was the only part of this movie that I had seen prior to this big rewatch, and it has stuck with me forever, as it probably has for an entire generation of moviegoers. Not to spoil too much, but while I thought this movie was pretty mediocre overall, I have to credit Final Destination 2 for a horror sequence that is, in its own way, responsible for altering human behavior to the same extent that Jaws did.
It’s unfortunate that after such a strong opening premonition, what follows is the first instance of using the Final Destination plot mold as straightforwardly and ho-humly as possible. Kimberly’s fellow survivors are a cop (Thomas Burke), a kid and his mom, a workaholic (Keegan Connor Tracy), a recent lottery winner (David Paetkau), a motorcycle-riding high school teacher (T.C. Carson), a pregnant delivery driver (Justina Machado), and a burnout (Rory Peters). The lottery winner dies first, and we’re starting out by jumping into the Goldbergian deaths for everyone, every time now that will henceforth be the defining trait of these films. He throws some old pasta out of a window and then proceeds to experience a series of implausible chain reactions: a magnet falls off of the fridge into his takeout, which then goes into the microwave; he spills oil while preparing a skillet to fry up some frozen snacks; his new Rolex gets caught in the sink, trapping him. We in the audience ask ourselves: Will the oil start a fire? Will the garbage disposal in the sink suddenly click on and mangle him? Will he have to turn on the disposal to get free? It’s not necessarily a bad thing that this will be all that there is to these movies from here on out (see above, re: “You get exactly what you expect in a nice way”), and it’s also good that the first of these survivor offings is one of the better ones. Unfortunately, this once again means that FD2 is front-loaded with the best stuff with a much weaker second half.
My friend that I watched FDs 2-4 with said that this one was his favorite, because there are some impressive deaths here, and that’s what he likes best. In addition to the aforementioned lottery winner (who meets his death when he manages to escape a fiery explosion in his apartment but slips on the spaghetti he threw out earlier and is impaled when the sticky fire escape ladder finally descends all the way), teenager Tim is flattened by a pane of glass that falls from a crane outside of his dentist’s office, his mother is killed due to broken failsafes in an elevator, and the burnout is bisected by a flying barbed wire fence. That’s what you’re probably here for, and you get what you want. Another positive is that Larter reprises her role as Clear Rivers from the first film, and we get two contributions to the (convoluted) lore: she’s managed to stay alive by committing herself to an institution where she finds safety in a padded cell and additional precautions, and we’re also introduced to the concept that Death ties up its loose ends, as each of the survivors in this one should have died sometime in the past year, but for various reasons, Alex’s actions aboard Flight 180 led to their survival. One woman was headed to a bed and breakfast where everyone else died in a gas leak, but she missed her flight because she was on the bus that hit Tammy in the first film; the teacher missed a fatal stabbing that happened to one of his colleagues instead because the school district transferred him to replace Miss Lewton; and so on and so forth.
This is all well and good, but I couldn’t shake the overall sense of cheapness that cast a pall over this one. The set-ups for the Goldbergian deaths is a high water mark for some, but for me, the difference in production quality and overall directorial cleverness between this and the next film was stark, so it ranks a little low for me. In conclusion: strong death sequences, shoddy character and framework.
Opening Disaster: Speaking of high water marks, this is the highest for the entire series. Iconic, socially influential, and twenty years later the marketing for Bloodlines directly invoked people’s decades-long fears that were instilled by the log truck pile-up. Impeccable and unimpeachable.
Best Death: Although Tim’s death is one of the more memorable (since the film had the guts, no pun intended, to kill off a child), the unexpected postscript death by barbecue explosion of a farm kid who happened to be saved by one of the survivors in an earlier scene may be the best part of the film other than the opening sequence. The workaholic’s death via being impaled not during a car crash but after when the airbag is deployed due to first responders’ use of the jaws of life is a neat little subversion as well.
Worst Death: Eugene and Clear’s hospital fireball is pretty goofy, and an ignominious end for Clear after her survival of the first film.
MVP: Despite minimal screen time, it’s definitely Tony Todd.
Spot the Battle “Star”: This time we’ve got a two-fer. I adore Keegan Connor Tracy; she’s been in a million things that I enjoy, with one-off and recurring characters on virtually every show shot in Vancouver: the Blue Fairy in Once Upon a Time, Professor Lipson in The Magicians, Norman’s first onscreen victim in Bates Motel, not to mention appearances on Supernatural, SG-1, First Wave, the list goes on. I even have a particular affection for her “sleep stories” in the Calm app. She plays a major role in this one as one of the survivors, and I almost completely forgot that she was in nine episodes of Battlestar. This film also features an appearance from Aaron Douglas as a frazzled deputy who rushes the pregnant survivor to the hospital; he was the Galactica’s deck chief, Tyrol.
Final Destination 3 (2006)
From the very first moments of FD3, I was immediately more impressed with this one than with its direct predecessor. The credits are well rendered, playing out over images of carnival rides and activities, and the text graphics pattern matches it; it’s a minor thing, but really sets the tone for what followed. Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is at a senior night at the local amusement park with her boyfriend, best friend, and the best friend’s boyfriend Kevin (Ryan Merriman) when she foresees the derailment of the park’s roller coaster and the deaths of everyone aboard. She demands to be let off of the ride, and the operators release all of the seats in her section and they deboard: goth shithead Ian McKinley (Kris Lemche), his girlfriend Erin (Alexz Johnson), football jock Lewis (Texas Battle), a couple of people whose identities are hidden and form part of the mystery, plus two airheaded stereotypes and the creep who won’t stop trying to film them. The accident happens as Wendy foresaw, and Death comes for the survivors one by one, because that’s the Final Destination formula.
The extent to which this means that these films run together also means that when you talk to other people about these movies, the questions that they ask show you what parts of them had memorable staying power. Final Destination 3? Is that the one with the log truck? (No, that’s 2.) Is that the one with the bridge collapse? (No, that’s 5.) Is that the one with the racecars? (No, that’s 4.) Is that the one with the mall? (No, that’s 4 again.) Sorry, folks; the questions we were looking for were “Is that the one with the roller coaster?” and “Is that the one with the tanning beds?” The two airheads, Ashley and Ashlyn, could slot right into any openings in Daria’s younger sister Quinn’s Fashion Club with ease, and their deaths by being cooked alive while trying to bronze up are two of the more memorable kills that Death racks up. Just as importantly, there’s a match cut between their two tanning beds to their side-by-side caskets at the funeral that shows that there’s a bit more thought being put into the direction and editing of this one. It’s not just about following a trail of little contributions that create a big problem, but has some real interest in creating something visually interesting and well-composed outside of simply watching how Death tips the dominoes. That’s the James Wong touch, as he’s back to direct this installment.
That said, the rest of the fatalities in this one are nothing too special, until the climax at the town’s tricentennial. The sequence in the hardware store runs a little too long, and closing with the death-by-nailgun of Erin borders on trite. Similarly, Lewis’s fatal workout is also nothing to write home about. By the time the fireworks start going off and spooking horses into galloping through crowds of people while dragging a rope with a heavy stake at the end, you’ll be grateful that someone decided to put their foot on the gas a little. It’s also worth noting that although the metaphorical scaffolding of this one is stronger than FD2’s, the script itself is a little undercooked. A great deal of hay is made about Wendy’s supposed need to be in control, but this never really amounts to anything more than telling us that this is her Primary Character Trait, and it never really gets around to showing it. I did like the new twist that all of Wendy’s (terrible) photographs taken the night of the roller coaster incident provided clues about how the survivors would be picked off one by one, and it’s good that the film can find some new wrinkle to add despite being, skeletally, exactly the same as the movies that came before it. I also appreciated that the film included a human antagonist, as it did with Carter in the first one, as it gives the characters something more tangible and real to fight against than just a spooky wind. This one is in the top half of my rankings, if for no other reason than that it’s trying harder than FD2, and mostly succeeding.
Opening Disaster: A pretty solid opener, all things considered. There’s a bit more work put into introducing the characters and their various motivations, and the fact that Wendy’s best friend was planning on dumping Kevin, a secret that only Wendy knows (and plans to take to her grave) lends the whole thing a bittersweet quality. Where the log truck sequence succeeds is in making something completely mundane feel like it has the potential for massive death. On planes and rollercoasters, people already feel a certain (and usually normal) amount of uncertainty and anxiety, so it’s less surprising when something goes awry. The maulings are pretty brutal, though, if that’s what you’re into.
Best Death: There’s a reason that people still talk about the tanning beds.
Worst Death: It’s Ian getting smashed by a cherry picker, easily.
MVP: I really wish it was Mary Elizabeth Winstead/Wendy here, but that underbaked element to her “control freak” characterization leaves her feeling less fleshed out than she could have been. I think I’m actually going to have to give it to sleazeball Frankie Cheeks. He captures the 2006 vibe more than anything else, and his pervy nature makes his death decently satisfying. A little bit of air gets let out of the balloon when he’s no longer part of the story.
Spot the Battle “Star”: Patrick Gallagher is one of those “Hey it’s that guy” actors, having guested in a million things. He’s here as the carnival employee who escorts the survivors off of the ride, and he had a memorable appearance as a terrorist in the first season BSG episode “Colonial Day.” Weirdly, I know him best from his appearance in the Rapture flick Revelation.
The Final Destination, aka Final Destination 4 (2009)
People say that this is the worst one, and they’re right. The Final Destination was shot to make the most out of the (at the time) most recent attempt to foist the gimmick of 3D movies on the public, and as such there’s a lot of stuff flying at you. Final Destination is, admittedly, the perfect franchise to translate to the “Here comes something fast!!” experience, but the models used are just bafflingly awful. The main character’s visions appear as giant, poorly-rendered low-res images of scissors, tow chains, and a truly laughable snake that wraps around a pole before morphing into a caduceus. It’s a universally agreed upon low point, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it features the return of FD2’s creative team of David R. Ellis as director and Eric Bress as writer. In between that film and this one, Bress wrote The Butterfly Effect and Ellis directed Snakes on a Plane; this information is presented without comment. Even the things that worked about that one are absent here, and the film’s very short 82 minute runtime speaks to just how little inspiration there existed to fill out the scaffolding of this premise. It’s barely a movie.
At a race track, Nick (Bobby Campo) foresees a blowout on the track that results in an escalating accident that will take the life of a huge number of the attendees. He creates enough of a ruckus that his girlfriend Lori (Shantel VanSanten), her friend Janet (Haley Webb), and his bro-y bud Hunt (Nick Zano) are escorted out by security guard George (Mykelti Wiliamson). George also ejects a racist asshole, and the commotion also ends up saving the life of a mother of two young brats, who was trampled to death in the original vision. The racetrack disaster then unfolds, and, you know the drill by now, Death is tracking down each of the survivors one by one in the order that they would have died before. By this point, the scene in which the person with the vision presents their research/theories to the others is old hat, and the recap itself just keeps getting longer since each previous film’s disaster is added to the list of historical instances each time. The random deductions that characters make to reason out Death’s plan are always like the non sequitur trains of thought that would pop up in the old Adam West Batman, but it’s particularly tedious this time around. It also doesn’t help that this is the least developed or interesting group of characters, with even the shallow characterizations of the folks back in FD2 feeling like people with rich backstory in comparison. Presumably to suit the 3D conversion, everything has flat, boring, TV style lighting that calls back to the cheap-feeling nature of Ellis and Bress’s previous collaboration.
My friend who loved FD2 hated this one. At about halfway into the movie, he stood up to leave the group screening, since he was bored, but decided to sit back down to try and see at least “one good death scene” (this was after the racist was burned alive and dragged behind his own tow truck while trying to light a cross on George’s lawn, which would turn out to be the best that the film had to offer). He ended up staying all the way through the end—a man getting sliced into pieces by a chain-link fence (what we around here refer to as getting Cube-d), another man getting his guts sucked out through his rectum by an overpowered pool filter, and a man getting hit by an ambulance—not a one of them was good enough to satisfy the particular craving for creative gore that the film-going public has come to expect from a series that’s branded itself so strongly at this point. Part of what makes these so effective is when people can see tragedy befall the characters in a convoluted but not impossible way and recognize the potential for things to go horribly wrong in their own life. The most tragic things that occur at the racetrack are the things that could happen in any public setting when something awful is going down and people stampede or otherwise panic, and in that way it has an admitted kind of universal applicability. But I don’t see a man getting his asshole stuck on a pool filter or watch another man get shot into a fence by a gas canister so hard that he gets smooshed through it like he was secretly made of cake and think “That could happen to me.” Really and truly not worth the time.
Opening Disaster: It’s fine.
Best Death: The most cathartic death is watching the racist asshole get dragged/burned to death while “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” plays over his radio. But the best death is probably the one that Lori has in the second premonition, in which she gets mauled to death by an elevator that has been busted by architectural damage. It’s marred by the fact that she starts coughing up blood when she’s only in the gears up to her shins, but it’s still the only thing that happened in this movie that reflects any real life anxieties that I have.
MVP: I really only enjoyed two sequences in this, which were the scenes in which Janet almost drowns in a car wash and the part of the film in which George attempts to kill himself over and over again to get on with it, but his attempts keep failing since he’s not the next person on the list. Although his backstory basically blends that of Eugene (who tried and failed to kill himself to choose his death rather than let Death choose him) and Mrs. Carpenter (who was resigned to death and looked forward to meeting her spouse and child on the other side) from FD2, it doesn’t feel like a retreading of the same ground. That’s owed all to Wiliamson’s performance; he’s the best thing here.
Spot the Battle “Star”: There is no overlap between Battlestar and this, the worst Final Destination film. Take from that what you will, although it’s probably simply because this was the only one shot in New Orleans instead of Vancouver. There is still a connection, however, as actress Shantel VanSanten had a major role as Karen on For All Mankind, Battlestar creator Ronald D. Moore’s current series.
Final Destination 5 (2011)
So, Final Destination 5 is actually … great? Although this one doesn’t lean as hard into comedy as Bloodlines would after it, it’s still the first time that this one went for as many jokes as it does scares. I also found the characters in this one to be some of the most likable; I really appreciated that several of the characters were making ends meet by working multiple jobs, just like I was around the same time. Sam (Nicholas D’Agosto) spends his days as a salesman alongside with his buddy Peter (Miles Fisher) at Presage Paper, and at nights he works for the local branch of Le Cáfe Miro 81, where he’s impressed the head chef so much that he’s been nominated to apprentice at the flagship location in Paris. This complicates his relationship with Molly (Emma Bell), who also works at Presage, as does Peter’s girlfriend Candice (Ellen Wroe), a competitive gymnast. Candice’s work enemy is Olivia (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood), the extremely nearsighted office hottie, although office IT guy Isaac (P.J. Byrne) is indiscriminate with his pervy flirtation with every woman in the office (and outside of it). All of them are being taken on a company retreat by bus by their boss, Lapman (David Koechner), and when the bus stops on a bridge that’s under construction, Sam has a vision of it collapsing, managing to prevent the deaths of the named characters above as well as new factory foreman Nathan (Arlen Escarpeta). You know the drill by now; this means that they’re all on Death’s list … except for Molly, who survived even in the original vision.
It was a pretty widely revealed spoiler at the time that this film was a stealth prequel to the original Final Destination, and it’s hard for me to imagine that this wasn’t obvious to anyone paying attention, even without that knowledge. There’s a noticeable backward technological step in all of the cell phones that people use, and there are some visible dates (like on the massage coupon that Isaac steals out of a dead co-worker’s desk, leading him to the very parlor in which he would meet his fare) that show that this is pre-2001. As in the original Final Destination, the main character is initially interrogated by federal agents under suspicion of committing an act of extremism, and they are pursued by a member of the FBI (Courtney B. Vance here), but the use of “extremist” instead of “terrorist” feels very 90s. And as soon as you realize that the job opportunity that Sam has means that he would be working at the same Paris cafe where Carter died in the epilogue of the first film, you get the inkling that he’s never going to make it to France. None of these movies has a happy ending (except perhaps 2), as the great cosmic joke of the series is that Death can never be cheated, and no matter what steps the characters take, they’re going to die just before the credits roll when they finally think that they’re safe. Despite this happening every single time, it’s always a little bit of a shock, and the way this one winds around and dovetails with the franchise’s beginning is nicely done. I watched 2–5 in order, then looped back around to the first, and the effect was seamless.
Tony Todd has his largest presence in any of these films in this one, where Bludworth reappears after a two film absence, once again a creepy figure at the scenes of the deaths of the bridge collapse survivors. Sam thinks he’s involved, but it’s revealed that he’s only the coroner (which isn’t exactly the same as a mortician, as Alex and Clear broke into a funeral home in the first one, not a morgue, but I’m quibbling), although he does clue them in on the whole “Death’s design” thing. There’s a fresh new wrinkle in this one for the first time in a while, as Bludworth mentions a theory that one could “steal” another person’s time by killing them directly, as kind of a sacrifice. When Nathan spots an accident about to happen while arguing with antagonistic union rep Roy, he tries to get both of them out of the way of a falling piece of industrial equipment, but Roy grapples with him instead and, when Nathan breaks free by pushing Roy away, Roy ends up impaled on a giant hook. When this does seem to cause Nathan’s death on the list to be skipped, Peter, already grieving the loss of Candice (who was the first survivor to die), goes a little off the deep end. Final Destination 5 doesn’t deviate too far from the formula, but it finally does something different and fresh, introducing a bit of a slasher element. Although he’s found a way to profit off of his resemblance to Tom Cruise, Fisher’s hairstyling and wardrobe as Peter give him a distinctively Patrick Bateman-esque aura, and it’s a lot of fun to watch him deteriorate into a willingness to kill to save himself.
Fundamentally, I think that I may simply be out of alignment with the audience that these are made for, with the biggest example of this being that I think these movies are at their best when there are other antagonists beyond simple, amorphous Death. If you’re into watching those dominoes fall, then you get what you want every time, and that’s what these movies exist for, so I’m the odd man out here. I’m much more invested when there’s something tangible for the heroes to grapple with, even if I know that they’re ultimately doomed and we’re all just killing time (no pun intended) before Death crashes a plain, train, or other automobile in (or around) which all of the so-happy-to-be-alive survivors will meet their inevitable gory deaths. Making one of the main characters devolve from friend to attempted murderer that the leads have to fight directly adds a level of complication, if not complexity, to the proceedings. This is the one I’m looking forward to watching again.
Opening Disaster: Ranks second behind the log truck pile-up in FD2. There may be a bit of geographical bias going on here as, being from Louisiana, I’ve spent a lot of my life driving over many, many somewhat scary bridges. The Mississippi River bridge between East and West Baton Rouge Parishes, the Morganza Spillway bridge, the Atchafalaya Spillway bridge, the Sunshine Bridge, and especially the structurally deficient Calcasieu River Bridge; I’ve travelled them all, countless times. And yet in all my anxious bridge crossings, I never considered that there were so many harrowing ways to die in a bridge collapse. Lapman is doused in hot road tar, Candice falls and is eviscerated by the mast of a sailboat passing below, Peter gets impaled by falling rebar, and Olivia manages to survive the fall into the water only to be crushed by a car. Horrifying.
Best Death: To reveal the cause and circumstances of Nathan’s death would give away too much after I’ve already said enough, but it’s classic stuff. Candice’s death in a gymnastics accident is certainly one of the more gruesome, and watching her do flips and spins on the bar while juuuust barely avoiding stepping on the screw that’s waiting to set off the chain of events is one of the most effectively tense set-ups. I have to give it to Isaac, though, as he really makes you groan with disgust at his whole deal before he bites it, comically.
Worst Death: Like FD4, this one was shot for 3D, but it’s much less obtrusive than in its predecessor. The credits feature lots of glass breaking at the audience, but I didn’t think much of it. When I read that this was the case, I could remember certain shots that, with that knowledge, were clearly throwing things at the camera, but I hadn’t given them a second thought. The only one that feels really out of place is Lapman getting beamed in the head by a heavy duty wrench that was shot out by machinery. It’s the least interesting by far.
MVP: I never really understood why Nick D’Agosto’s career wasn’t more successful. I remember first seeing him as West in the second season of Heroes, where he played Hayden Panettiere’s love interest that year before disappearing after the 2007 writer’s strike resulted in an abbreviated season. He got some exposure on The Office, where he played Jan’s handsome young assistant who spurred Michael’s jealousy, and then he was in that movie Fired Up, where he and Eric Christian Olsen con their way into attending cheerleading camp so that they can hook up. It was a flop, but somewhere in a box in my closet I still have a mini football from the movie’s marketing campaign, since we used to get a lot of that kind of stuff at KLSU, so it’s never all that far from my mind. I find him very charming here, and he has the precise amount of boy-next-door charisma to pull this role off.
Spot the Battle “Star”: The head chef at the restaurant where Isaac works is played by Mike Dopud, who played Specialist Gage (a crewman from the Battlestar Pegasus who later joined in the Season 4 mutiny) on Battlestar Galactica, and appeared again in the prequel webseries Blood & Chrome.
Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)
A full review of this one is coming soon! Some initial thoughts on Bloodlines is that it’s a strong entry overall. It’s got a great opening sequence, manages to subvert expectations in several places, and goes full tilt into being more comedic, which made it feel very fresh.
Opening Disaster: One of the best. This one tapped into my primal fear of heights and pumped me for every ounce of adrenaline I had in my body. The rooftop restaurant that collapsed filled me with abject terror; I was sick for the entire first fifteen minutes.
Best Death: After such a long absence, it’s great that the film goes for broke with one of its earliest death sequences, for Uncle Howard. The dominoes in this one feel perfectly calibrated for maximum physical repulsion and suspense. It would have only been topped by one that followed, except that one was actually a fake-out, so I can’t count it officially.
Worst Death: Darlene kicking it mid-sentence when a light pole falls on her was a bit of a let down.
MVP: Tony Todd is the obvious choice once again, especially as the younger actors in this one are probably offering some of the least interesting performances. I think I have to give it up for Richard Harmons’s Erik Campbell here, however, as he has the most dynamic performance, delivers some pretty great lines (and, according to press releases, had a lot of great alternates for some of the ad libs that made it to the final print), and is overall one of the more endearing characters to come out of the series, even if he’s too obnoxious to get along with in real life. He’s the goth guy from FD3 done correctly.
Spot the Battle “Star”: I immediately recognized Vancouverian actor Richard Harmon, who plays major character Erik in this one, from his appearances in many of the shows shot there. He has a notable face, and the first time I saw him in something was in his appearance on Fringe, in the very important episode “White Tulip.” The next time I remember seeing him on screen was in two episodes of the Battlestar spinoff Caprica, and was going to use that as a slight cheat since he was never technically on BSG. But I also recognized Gabrielle Rose for her many TV movie and genre television appearances, having otherwise completely forgotten that she was in the BSG episode “The Woman King” until I was perusing her IMDb profile, so we’re in the clear! To be fair, “The Woman King” is a pretty forgettable episode.
Final (heh) ranking, from worst to best:
6.The Final Destination (aka 4): Absolute bottom of the barrel. Bad kills, unlikable or incomplete characters, hard to believe that this was released as a finished film.
5. Final Destination 2: Shoddy narrative framework, nothing to speak of in terms of cinematography, paper-thin character work, but good death sequences. Best opening sequence, though.
4./3. Final Destination 3 and Final Destination: Bloodlines (tie): Both very solid entries that have an equal balance of scares, character work, and narrative throughline.
2. Final Destination: The first and one of the best; strong work from X-Files alums.
1. Final Destination 5: Strongest overall, most consistent; brings something fresh to the table by introducing the slasher/human antagonist angle.
The central conceit of Kirsten Johnson’s fantasy/documentary hybrid film Dick Johnson is Dead sounds almost too morbid & emotionally traumatizing to stomach for its full 90 minutes. Somehow, though, the execution leaves the film feeling surprisingly lighthearted and, against all odds, cute. The titular Dick Johnson is Kirsten’s father, who is grappling with losing his mind & body to old age & senility. To help prepare for this impending familial loss, the retired psychiatrist agreed to collaborate with his documentarian daughter on a film about his death. Johnson is depicted lying in his coffin, lounging on his favorite chair in Heaven and, most frequently, dying on camera in various mundane accidents that could reasonably kill a man of his fragile age. It’s an exercise that’s clearly meant to function as cinematic therapy for one specific family, but in practice it works as broad, universally relatable gallows humor. We’re all going to die (some of us sooner than we’d like), so we might as well get used to the idea and learn to have a laugh over that inevitable fate.
If there’s anything that’s especially tough to endure as an audience here, it’s in Kirsten Johnson’s lingering loss of her mother, who died nearly a decade ago after suffering a more extreme version of memory loss than her still-living husband. Johnson’s haunted by the irreversible fact that she did not take the time to document & collaborate with her mother while she was still in her prime, a mistake she’s determined not to repeat with her father. By making a film with her father about his own impending death, she’s not only getting comfortable with the reality of that tragedy, but she’s also making sure to spend time with him while she can. Dick Johnson is Dead is gradually less about envisioning its subject dead in a coffin or on an NYC sidewalk and more about documenting his gregarious personality, his most guarded vulnerabilities, and his personal fantasies of an ideal world. Dick Johnson hams up the various performances of his death with broad comedic humor because, at heart, the project is mostly about having fun & spending time with his filmmaker daughter while he can.
Dick Johnson’s escalating senility does limit how far the film’s central conceit can be pushed, both because it would be cruel to make him work long hours on movie sets and because he eventually forgets the fantasy aspect of the project, confusing stage blood for the real thing. Kirsten Johnson isn’t entirely interested in maintaining the structure of that staged-deaths conceit anyway. Much of the film shows her deliberately stripping back the artifice of both the staged-death vignettes and the more traditional documentarian techniques at play. Stunt doubles, boom mic operators, gore makeup technicians, and everyone else involved in the project are allowed to wander into the frame as if this were a home movie of a company picnic rather than a high-concept art project. As a result, the biggest emotional impacts come from intimate moments like Johnson responding “I didn’t know that” to her father’s various anecdotes or from their tough conversations about what freedoms he has to give up as he ages, like the ability to drive. If anything, the staged death scenes are the film’s comic relief, and it’s the quiet moments of idle time in-between where the severity of the situation hits the family (and the audience) hardest.
I didn’t really grow up with anime as a child, or even a teen. It was something I first explored in my early twenties in the aughts when it seemed like the last remaining sanctuary for hand-drawn animation in modern cinema. And even since then my familiarity with anime has been very surface-level, defined by major genre touchstones like Miyazaki, Sailor Moon, and Satoshi Kon. The one major exception I can think of in this late-to-the-table anime exposure was my childhood VHS tape of Little Nemo:Adventures in Slumberland, an 80s relic (and a Japanese-American co-production) that I watched countless times as a kid despite it being a drowsy, unhurried mess. Watching its contemporary peer Night on the Galactic Railroad for the first time recently felt like a weirdly comforting return to those childhood viewings of Little Nemo – one of the rare anime titles where I felt at home with the tone & artistry instead of in over my head with a genre I don’t know nearly enough about. Night on the Galactic Railroad is a soothing, hypnotic film for me, which is odd because it’s intended to play as a devastatingly somber fantasy drama.
This is an adaptation of a popular 1930s children’s novel from Japan, in which a lonely young boy escapes the isolation of caring for his sick mother in a small town where hardly anyone notices him by riding a magical late-night train with his only friend his age. For reasons unexplained, the movie decided to remain faithful to the book’s plot but recast most of its characters as talking cats. But not all of them! It’s in no rush to emphasize or justify this major alteration to its source text (or to clarify exactly why most characters are cats, but some remain human). In fact, it’s in no rush to do anything at all. It takes nearly 40 minutes for the titular magic train to arrive, before which we mostly watch our melancholic feline protagonist attend to his daily chores at work, school, and home. Once on the train, he has lowkey conversations about the immensity of the galaxy and the meaning of life with a series of passengers – including his aforementioned bestie and, most surprisingly, passengers of The Titanic. The tone is grim & low energy, slowly chugging along to a major reveal about what riding the train symbolizes in its closing minutes, long after an adult audience would have guessed the twist. If young children had the attention span to follow its story and parse out its symbolism, it’s devastating enough that it could really fuck them up. Instead, it plays like a minor-notes lullaby, a warm naptime blanket made entirely of grief & regret.
Besides my recollections of Little Nemo, Night on the Galactic Railroad reminds me of when I had Final Fantasy on Gameboy as a kid but didn’t really know how to play it, so I would just wander around the game’s villages talking to fictional strangers. Absolutely nothing happens in this movie and the feline character designs stray disturbingly close to online furry art, but it still works like a soothing salve on a troubled mind. This film is potent catnip for anyone who can lose themselves in the pleasures of looking at cute cats & outer space imagery for the eternity of a lazy afternoon. Its unrushed tedium isn’t boring so much as it’s a time distortion device, making 100 minutes stretch on for 100 pleasantly melancholic hours – like contemplating the nature of Death while drifting through outer space all by your lonesome. It’s not the dazzling, intricate artistry and propulsive excitement of anime that I’ve come to appreciate in recent years as I’ve sought out the legendary standouts of the medium, but rather the dozy nostalgia-prone slow-drift of 80s anime that I grew up with as a kid.
Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Boomer made Britnee, Alli, and Brandon watch Wings of Fame (1990).
Boomer: Wings of Fame is an odd little film that at first appears to be about the nature of life and death, or perhaps celebrity or love, but makes no real statements about any of these big concepts. Instead, it is itself a “high concept” film with a singular conceit: the afterlife of the famous is different from that which awaits you or me (if anything other than floating for eternity on a foggy and dismal sea awaits us), and their accommodations are equivalent to the fame that they retain in the waking world. When a famous actor (Peter O’Toole) is assassinated in Europe, his accidentally-killed murderer (Colin Firth) immediately follows him into this strange new world beyond the veil of mortality, having gained notoriety equivalent to the actor’s as a result of having dealt his death blow.
Within this world, Cesar Valentin (O’Toole) struggles to discern what drove Brian Smith (Firth) to want to see him dead, as the two rub undead elbows with a roller-skating Einstein and scientists, politicians, and artists of various disciplines. Other than Einstein, none of them actually exist (there is a Rose Frisch who was a scientist, but she died 25 years after the film was released, so it wouldn’t make sense for her to be in this world), but you wouldn’t know that from the film itself. Cleverly, Wings shows you people that you believe existed, even though they didn’t, like Bianca the sad pop star and Zlatogorski the Soviet poet, who actually ascends from the basement back to a stateroom as his work gains popularity in the living world as the political situation changes.
Brandon, what do you think about this conception of the world that is to come? Do you think that it was a smart choice to generate unreal celebrities to populate this surreal world? How does this contribute to that air of surrealism?
Brandon: I’m honestly conflicted over the introduction of fictional celebrities to this dreamworld scenario. Not only are they a little distracting (I initially felt like a dolt for only recognizing names like Einstein, Hemingway, and Lassie before realizing many of these characters never really existed); they also partially drain the premise of some of its potential surrealism instead of adding to it. Titles like The Congress, Celebrity Death Match, Clone High, and Mr. Lonely have similarly generated absurdist humor out of juxtaposing celebrities we’re not used to seeing interact in a shared, impossible realm, but are each more fully committed to evoking a surrealist effect out of that Famous Person overlap. Wings of Fame is something of a pioneer within this post-modern enclave, however, predating many of those titles by a decade or two. The only example of absurdist gathering-famous-people-throughout-time-in-a-single-space media I can think of that predates it is Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure from just a year earlier and that film spends its entire runtime going out of its way to make that juxtaposition possible. I think Wings of Fame would’ve been a much more jarringly surreal work if it had populated its eerily sparse stage play sets with more recognizable historical figures, at least as background characters. (There’s a moment featuring a generic “rocker” in particular that easily could’ve been punched up with a Hendrix-type). I’m also not convinced that the film was ever intended to be an aggressively surreal picture in the first place, unlike the similar works that followed. A lot of its charm rests in its subtle, underplayed execution of an over-the-top premise and the creation of fictional celebrities is an essential part of that approach.
As Wings of Fame is the sole feature credit for Dutch filmmaker Otakar Votocek as a writer-director, it’s difficult to get a full estimation of what sensibility he was attempting to convey here. I do get the sense, though, that he was more interested in the mechanics of how this Celebrity Limbo works rather than how his characters’ inner lives are affected by their artificial environment. Wings of Fame is mostly a philosophical piece about how legacy translates to currency in this afterlife of luxury, setting up a kind of class war between tiers of celebrities who enjoy different levels of fame, and how our only chance of (temporarily) avoiding fading into oblivion is to leave a lasting impact on pop culture or history while we’re still breathing. It makes total sense for the film to use archetype placeholders instead of real life historical figures in that way, but the characters’ absence of pre-loaded personalities does cause the central story to stumble a bit when it switches its interests from philosophy to psychology. The mystery of why Firth’s assassin takes out O’Toole’s pompous actor in the opening sequence is never as interesting to me as the details of the space where that decision lands them. Similarly, the contentious love triangle they form with the gloomy pop singer Bianca feels more like a necessary evil plot structure than a dynamic the film is genuinely interested in (although I am often tickled by the way Bianca continually shrugs off their confessions of deep, unending love for her, since she presumably hears those kinds of things all the time). Part of the reason those conflicts feel a little empty to me is because I don’t know the characters well enough as people to recognize what they’re going through (as opposed to their much more fascinating, heavily detailed surroundings). Using real celebrities whose personas we’re already familiar with might have fixed that.
Britnee, what do you make of the film’s balance between telling a compelling story and establishing the rules of its supernatural, fame-obsessed afterworld? Did the mystery of Firth’s murder motivation or the outcome of the Bianca-centered love triangle mean as much to you as the mechanics of the Celebrity Limbo premise?
Britnee: I had a difficult time focusing on any of film’s central plots because I was more interested in figuring out how the Celebrity Limbo works. The idea of a hotel for dead celebrities is fascinating, so of course, that’s what I focused on. The idea of celebrities getting downgraded to shittier rooms as they become forgotten in the living world was so smart and hilarious. It’s hard not to think about recent dead celebrities in that scenario. For instance, when Bill Paxton passed away earlier this year, there was an influx of people watching Twister and Big Love, so there’s not doubt that he initially would move into a luxurious suite. As time moves on, this will begin to decline, so up to the attic he goes. It really made me think about the craze that occurs after famous musicians and actors die, but how it all starts to dwindle as time goes by. They’re never really “forgotten;” they just aren’t topping the charts anymore.
Also, the film sort of forced me to feel that way because it doesn’t really do much as far as storytelling goes. Caesar has a short-lived confrontation with Brian, but it’s not very aggressive or emotional. The love story between Bianca and Brian is very bland, and there’s not much passion between the two of them. Yes, they make love and she cries in his arms from time to time, but there’s no real connection. I don’t think this is a bad thing at all (I actually enjoyed it very much), but it drove me to really not care too much about any of the film’s main plots.
What really struck my interest was the lottery system that allows Brian and Caesar to be released back into the real world. I wish the film would have spent more time following the two on their journey back into the world of the living.
Alli, would you have liked the film to be half about Brian and Caesar’s journey in limbo and half about their return to the real world? Why or why not?
Alli: I think it would have been nice to see slightly more of Mr. Valentin’s journey in a world where he’s been dead and gone. Would he have ended up being an impersonator of himself or would older people and movie lovers on the street just make comments about how much he looks like himself? Obviously, Caesar is used to a certain standard of living and now he’s suddenly penniless on the streets, so I think it could have been a depressing peek into the world of washed-up celebrities. There’s always a place for him in community theater, though, so maybe he’d end up in the acting world again. I’m a big Peter O’Toole fan. He’s always great. I think his chemistry with Firth wasn’t the best, but he’s enough of a character to carry it along. It would have been fun to watch them navigate the world and team up. After all, Brian is the only person Caesar has that understands what he’s been through and wouldn’t think he’s crazy for telling his story. Basically, I want more O’Toole screen time in general.
I didn’t really understand exactly why Brian chose Caesar in the climactic lottery. He was Caesar’s murderer, so maybe felt indebted that way, especially watching the death authorities usher him onto a transport into the mists. But while we know that the logic of this world is obviously nonexistent, there could have been a resurgence of interest in Valentin’s work. That’s the thing about being famous: you’re constantly shifting from being in an out of the public consciousness. I’d like to have seen a point about that made with the tide rolling in with some of the left-for-obscurity celebrities walking back ashore.
Boomer, do you think the movie would have benefited from people being able to check back in once their fame resurged? Or just more logic to the way the hotel works in general?
Boomer: I’m not really sure. I like that there’s a bit of dream logic to the way that this afterlife works, although I admit that I often go back and forth on my feelings about the concreteness of the “magic” (for lack of a better term) in the films that I watch. I will say that my personal favorite subplot in the film is the story of the fall and rise of Zlatogorski: he finds himself in the bowels of the hotel as a semi-forgotten Russian poet, but his poetry finds a new life in the hearts and minds of a nascent group of Soviets, leading the attendants of the hotel to force him against his will to ascend back to a stateroom in accordance with his fame in the world of the living. He rejects this elevation (as one would expect of a person whose works touch the hearts of hopeful communists, he is not a fan of this social striation) and ultimately tries to return to the sea of obscurity on whose shore the hotel sounds, but is unable to slip blissfully into the anonymity (and post-death rest) that he so desires. It’s a fascinating character study in miniature, both of an individual character and, in its own way, of a nation, but it also gives us the most revelatory information we have about the “rules” of this afterlife: we know that your accommodations are determined by your notoriety among the living, but you also cannot end this cycle even if you want to fade away into the night.
So what happens if someone becomes so insignificant that they are rejected from the hotel, but there is a resurgence in public interest in them? It’s an interesting thought experiment, but one which I’m not sure can be adequately satisfied. Perhaps they are spat back up on shore just as Zlatogorski was when he tried to leave, half-drowned and soaked to the bone, as you suggested. Maybe there’s no resurgence, just the echoes of their memory in the minds of man. One could even argue that those people who experience this complete absence from cultural relevance only to be remembered are those despairing faces we see floating in the open water amid the mists, begging to be saved. Or maybe that’s what really happens to the people who win the “lottery” and get to return to life for a second chance, and the lottery itself is all a sham. After all, it’s not as if Valentin has been completely forgotten by the world at large, as his film work seems to be experiencing (an admittedly minuscule) revival. Maybe it’s really Brian who is along for the ride and not the other way around, like how no one ever thinks about William Alexander or Richard Burbage until the next wave of “Was Shakespeare really Shakespeare?” madness comes along.
Every element of this world could be nothing more than a facade, but I don’t think that making the mechanics of this afterlife more specific and transparent would better serve the film. Its strengths lie in being a work that evokes this kind of discussion, and making the rules more explicit would undoubtedly take away some of the magic, for me at least. Part of what makes the narrative so strong for me is that we often think of that which lies beyond the veil in terms of absolutes or absences: heaven or hell, or perhaps nothing. Instead, Wings of Fame posits a place that is both heaven (for many) and hell (for people like Zlatogorski) and is thus neither. If death takes us to a heaven, a hell, or merely oblivion, the one thing that all these conceptions shares is an understanding that there is a finality, in either a just reward or quiet nothingness. The hotel is all and none of these things, but most significantly it is a place that is just like the world we live in now, full of anxiety, a desire for more, and a place in society that is largely determined by the opinions of others, over which we have little, if any control.
Brandon, how did you feel about the escape clause/lottery that results in Brian and Valentin being returned to life? How do you interpret that event in relation to the film’s themes? What do you make of the fact that they re-emerge as adult men, not reborn (although there are very few narratives like this one in film, I feel like the end of What Dreams May Come, in which the protagonist’s wife escapes her personally created hell to be reincarnated anew as an infant, is the standard finale of the few narratives that explore death and what follows it in this way)?
Brandon: The lottery system conclusion of the film was more confusing than satisfying for me, mostly because it was a previously unmentioned idea that completely upends the afterlife’s core dynamics at the very last second. The lottery’s not exactly a deus ex machina, since it merely shifts the goal posts for victory instead of saving the day, but it does leave the movie with the feeling of a hastily-written comedy sketch without an ending that goes out on the weirdest note possible out of desperation. I do appreciate that the mystery & the melancholy of the film is carried through the conclusion as Brian and Valentin return to Earth as the literal undead, but I’m not sure that the denouement has any thematic significance to how the afterlife works or how fame can make a person relatively immortal. The worst possible ending would have seen the two men come to in a hospital room after the opening assassination attempt in an “It was all a dream” reveal, but I’m not sure this version wasn’t at least a slightly similar disappointment. To be honest, a reincarnation-as-babies ending might have even been preferable, since this one felt so thematically disconnected & hazy.
I don’t think the ending does much to lessen the impact of the philosophically stimulating reflections on fame that come before it, however. Like I said before, the layout & the mechanics of the fame-economy afterlife Wings of Fame envisions is much more interesting than the interpersonal character dramas it contains, since the characters aren’t nearly as fleshed out or detailed as the (after)world they inhabit. I’m less interested in the lottery system escape that releases the characters from this realm than I am in the question of whether the realm itself is hellish or heavenly. The idea of history’s most infamous personalities coexisting in a kind of eternal artists’ salon is initially far more appetizing than the fading-into-oblivion alternative, but Wings of Fame does a good job of complicating its allure. Described as a limbo ruled by “jealousy, fantasy, and boredom,” there’s a kind of psychological torture inherent to an eternity spent in a mansion with mismatched, egotistical celebrities that might be . . . less than ideal.
Britnee, do you think the hellish or heavenly aspects of Celebrity Limbo ever outweigh each other or did this movie’s version of the afterlife register as entirely neutral to you? Is “living” in this post-mortem mansion a prize for a life well-lived, the punishing price of fame, or ultimately neither?
Britnee: I found Celebrity Limbo to be a very hellish place. The idea of being confined to living in a bland hotel until the lottery system works in your favor makes me want to cry. All the silence, dull colors, and obnoxious dead celebrities would drive me insane! It’s possible I would feel differently if the hotel wasn’t so boring. Perhaps being trapped in a hotel that was similar to a Disney resort wouldn’t be so bad. All those huge pools, funky colored walls, and bowls of free ice cream don’t seem like a bad deal to me. There’s just something about the hotel in this movie that makes me really uncomfortable. Also, the idea of being downgraded to a crappy room or upgraded to a fancy room based on something completely out of your control is absolutely nerve-racking. I can’t help but imagine myself getting comfortable in a decent room and then being forced to move to one of those dirty rooms on the upper floor where I would spend my time anxiously waiting for a change in my popularity. Because of the hellish vibes that I get from Celebrity Limbo, I would have to say that it’s more of a place of punishment than a reward for fame. The rich and famous are known for always doing what they want and getting what they want, and that’s not a possibility in this realm. Their money and power means nothing in limbo, and they rely on the world of the living to keep their memory alive. Honestly, I kind of like the idea of celebrities getting a taste of the reality they avoided in the living world once they enter the afterlife.
Alli, if Wings of Fame was a current film, what do you think Celebrity Limbo would be like?
Alli: I think a current day Wings of Fame would include a lot of self-created celebrities, along with more pop stars, mentions of drugs, and probably an overwhelming soundtrack. So basically even more hellish.
Although, I think it would be a completely different sort of strange. The current era certainly has had more time to reflect on the nature of celebrity, and we even have a whole different idea of what a celebrity is. You can be a YouTube star, a “reality” TV star, have a sex tape scandal, or just run a popular blog, and that’s extremely weird. (It’s especially strange considering that so many of these self-created celebrities are teenagers.) The way you can go from a regular person on the internet to instant fame with a single viral video is really disorienting to think about. It also means that just as quickly as you rose you can fall back into obscurity once another person gets the spotlight. In the era of internet fame and noise, there would be so much changing of rooms that I don’t think the staff would be able to keep up. I do like to think about the amount of internet-famous cats would be there, though. Colonel Meow is not forgotten amongst the legions of cat ladies.
All those teenagers, self-absorbed adults, and bursts of general chaos would probably devolve into a Lord of the Flies-type scenario: tribes of kids just looking for some validation and ways to fit in, claiming the entire ball room or hedge maze. It would be interesting, but definitely lack the slow-paced meditation that Wings of Fame accomplished. I think a lot of the themes of the film would suffer because of our current era’s transparently shallow celebrities. I think we as a culture have embraced the meaninglessness of fame way too much for a contemporary film to be anything but fake-deep and maybe even edgy.
Lagniappe
Alli: Part of the way Wings of Fame avoids coming across as trying too hard is the surrealist and absurdist humor. I know we’ve talked about the lottery scene being sort of an out of nowhere type thing, but I just loved the oblivion S.W.A.T. team swarming in and the juxtaposition of the game show atmosphere.
I had also a lot of moments during this movie thinking of the French New Wave classic Last Year at Marienbad, which takes place at a mysterious hotel filled with ghostlike guests who seem to lack direction. It’s almost the serious, Peter O’Toole-less version. It doesn’t have any thoughts on the ideas of fame, but it certainly has a similar surrealist feel.
Britnee: I felt like I was watching a episode of a televisions series, not a full blown movie, when viewing Wings of Fame. The film didn’t feel like it was complete once it finished. I really think the movie would have benefited from spending a little more time focusing on “life” after the lottery win.
Brandon: As much as I was fascinated by Wings of Fame‘s world-building, I really do believe that it was a mistake to not indulge in filling the characters’ ranks with real life historical figures & pop culture celebrities. The biggest missed opportunity in that dynamic might have been to take Peter O’Toole’s snobbish Shakespearean actor down a peg by having the actual William Shakespeare either insult his talents or offend his posh sensibilities with some Al Bundy-style slobbery. O’Toole doesn’t get much in the way of comeuppance by the movie’s conclusion and it could have been amusing to see him briefly have his balloon deflated by a (dead) celebrity he admires.
Boomer: Thanks for indulging me in this one. I know that I normally recommend movies that are bizarre in a different way, with style but little artistic depth (Class of 1999), flicks that are very genre but with an unusual twist (Head Over Heels), or dark comedies that maybe take it too far (Citizen Ruth), so it was nice to share this one with all of you.
Upcoming Movies of the Month January: The Top Films of 2017
Even before Fritz Lang bucked against the boundaries of cut & dry cinema in the early masterworks Metropolis & M, the director pushed the artform into then-unexplored territory in the silent horror Destiny. Released in the wake of the seminal Swedish masterpiece The Phantom Carriage, Destiny (sometimes billed as Behind the Wall or Weary Death) offers yet another striking image of Death as he conducts his business of harvesting expired souls (this time depicted as a passenger in a carriage instead of a driver, oddly enough). The early German expressionism landmark expanded the limitations of film as a medium, even cited by legendary directors like Alfred Hitchcock & Luis Buñuel as proof that cinema had potential & merit as an artform. The film’s ambitious special effects, unconventional storytelling, and morbid mix of death & romance all amount to a one of a kind glimpse into modern art cinema’s humble silent era beginnings.
The most instantly fascinating aspect of Destiny is its image of Death. The grim reaper is very human in this world, known to the town where he sets up shop merely as “the stranger.” Although he does sport the same sunken eyes & hollow cheeks as Death in The Phantom Carriage (and later in The Seventh Seal) he exchanges the now-traditional hooded robe for a fairly conventional brimmed hat. “The stranger” leases property next to a small town graveyard & erects a massive wall with no perceptible entrance, thoroughly confusing the spooked townspeople who are his new neighbors (but not enough for them to turn down his gold). A young woman uncovers “the stranger’s” secret when she witnesses a procession of bodyless souls entering through his wall, her missing/dead fiancee among them. The woman begs for her fiancee’s life after wrongfully infiltrating Death’s realm & he tells her tree tales of tragic romance in which Death conquers Love as part of their negotiation. What’s most noteworthy here is that while “the stranger” has no qualms ending a baby’s life in a brutally casual manner as one of his duties, he is far from the heartless mercenary of Bergman’s uncaring Death. As “the stranger” puts it himself, “Believe me, my task is hard! It’s a curse! I am wary of seeing the sufferings of men and of earning hatred for obeying God.” That’s about as empathetic of a portrayal of Death as you’re likely to find in 1921, The Phantom Carriage included.
Unfortunately, this darkly surreal framing device proves to be far more interesting than any of the three tales of Death conquering Love “the stranger” tells as the film’s meat & potatoes. Destiny‘s depictions of doomed romance in ancient Persia, China, and Italy feel exceedingly conventional in juxtaposition with the bizarre introduction of “the stranger” & his “realm”. Even when the individual stories fail to excite, however, the film remains a grand achievement in special effects & set design. By the time the third tale hits the screen it’s obvious that Lang was largely interested in showing off technique & not necessarily in telling a worthwhile story (or four). Early visual accomplishments in Destiny involve massive hand-built sets (most significantly the slender, stunning staircases & candles of “the stranger’s realm”) and maybe an occasional detail like a pint of beer transforming into an hourglass, but by the end the film devolves into literal parlor tricks & cinema magic showboating.
Lang more than earns those victory laps, though, considering how advanced the camera trickery plays in light of its release date & the artistic heights he’d later push those techniques to in Metropolis. It also helps that the film’s conclusion returns to “the stranger’s” negotiations with the young would-be widow, a scenario that continually sours despite the woman learning over the course of three tales that she can and will not win. Destiny can be striking in its visual accomplishments & individual moments of brutality, but what really stood out to me is that the film’s message is something like “Love does not conquer Death. Death always prevails.” It’s a lesson made even stronger by the depiction of Death as a sympathetic soul (or lack thereof), something you don’t see often even in a modern context, except maybe in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.
Have you ever completely forgotten that you’ve seen a film before until you’re in the middle of watching it? I ran across a couple posts recently that compared Stanely Kubrick’s masterful horror landmark The Shining to a 1920s Swedish film named The Phantom Carriage. There was one .gif in particular that mirrored the two works’ infamous axe scenes that really caught my attention while scrolling through Tumblr posts. I made a point to bump the Criterion-restored version of The Phantom Carriage to the top of my Hulu queue only to discover about five minutes into the film that I had seen it once before, years & years ago, and already really enjoyed it.
A silent film that combines horror & dramatic tragedy, The Phantom Carriage tells a similar story as works like It’s a Wonderful Life & A Christmas Carol with an intense focus on the supernatural aspect of that framework. In the movie’s mythology whoever dies last on the last day of the year must drive Death’s carriage for a full year. Each day feels like 100 years as the titular phantom carriage’s driver makes their rounds like a mail room clerk, collecting souls from the recently deceased on Death’s behalf. The horse & carriage are always the same, but the driver is different each year, almost like a morbid version of the Tim Allen comedy The Santa Clause.
On this particular New Year’s Eve the newest phantom carriage driver-elect is one David Holm, a boozy sinner who’s spent most of his life abusing anyone who dares to love him. Before David’s (literally) given the reins, however, he’s forced to take a remorseful journey through his own past, bearing witness to each horrifically shitty thing he’s done to his fellow man. David is forced by Death’s previous servant to watch as his past self abandons his family in favor of booze, shames the charitable for caring about his well-being, and intentionally tries to spread consumption among the innocent out of pure malice. He can barely stand to watch himself act like such a destructive ass & that discomfort is a large portion of his punishment as Death’s new servant.
Outside the obvious homage in the axe scene pictured above, there isn’t much to The Phantom Carriage‘s connection to The Shining except on a very basic thematic level. The Phantom Carriage is a ghost story about alcoholism & familial abuse in which the temporary caretaker of a supernatural, cursed establishment is driven to cruelty, so yeah, it does telegraph a lot of the basic structure of where Kubrick would take his Steven King adaptation over 50 years later. However, Kubrick is far from the first director who comes to mind while watching The Phantom Carriage, which is likely why I didn’t remember seeing the film before when prompted by those social media posts.
It’s Ingmar Bergman who pulled the most readily recognizable influence from the silent classic. As soon as Death’s servant arrives in the iconic hooded robe & sickle get-up, Bergman’s version of Death in The Seventh Seal immediately comes to mind. Before I even read this film’s Wikipedia page I could’ve told you Bergman watched The Phantom Carriage religiously and, indeed, the director claimed to have viewed it at least once a year. It’s possible to argue that The Shining would’ve been a very different work without The Phantom Carriage‘s influence, but what’s an even more immense question is just how different Bergman’s entire aesthetic would be without the seminal work. It’s crazy to think of the massive influence Bergman’s image of Death has had across pop culture, from The Last Action Hero to The Independent to Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (naming a few personal favorites), and that its seed was actually planted in the silent era.
The Phantom Carriage is well worth a watch even outside its massive influence on the likes of Kubrick & Bergman. The film was noteworthy in its time for innovations in its ghostly camera trickery and its flashback-within-a-flashback narrative structure. Those aspects still feel strikingly anachronistic & forward-thinking today, especially the gnarly phantom imagery, but you don’t have to be a film historian to appreciate what’s essentially a timeless story of brutally cold selfishness & heartbreaking remorse. I also like the movie’s gimmick of trying to make a non-Halloween holiday spooky (the film was set, plotted around, and released on New Year’s Eve), something schlock horror would do with Valentine’s Day, Christmas, and whatever else for decades to come. It’s a shame that at one point I forgot I watched The Phantom Carriage in the first place. It’s a great slice of horrific silent cinema & innovative filmmaking history.
In our Swampchat discussion of March’s Movie of the Month, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, I pointed out how great of a one-two punch the movie was in combination with February’s Movie of the Month, Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death. As a double feature, the two movies feed off each other well thematically, especially in their contemplation of an uncaring, inevitable Death. Even Roger Corman himself saw the similarities in the films’ subject matter, which lead to him delaying the production of Masque for years. According to Wikipedia, he was quoted as saying, “I kept moving The Masque of the Red Death back, because of the similarities, but it was really an artificial reason in my mind.” The films do have a similar doom & gloom aesthetic in their personifications of Death in the time of a plague, but the differences that ultimately make their connection “artificial” are very much fundamental in nature. The Seventh Seal and The Masque of the Red Death are connected by a plague and by Death’s portrayal as a living character, but both Death’s personality and the social effect of a plague on its suffering population are strikingly different in the two films.
Both The Seventh Seal & The Masque of the Red Death rightfully portray Death as an inevitability, but the personality traits they assign him are almost directly oppositional. In The Seventh Seal, Death allows himself to be amused. The movie’s iconic chess match, while a stay of execution for Antonius Black, is nothing more than a diversion, a light entertainment for Death. Death later continues his playful bemusement with Antonius by posing as a priest and taking his confession. Death has a sly sense of humor in this exchange, albeit one with a morbid result. In Corman’s Masque, The Red Death wouldn’t be caught alive participating in such tomfoolery. The Red Death is very much a professional in his duties, carrying the impartial poise of a courtroom judge in his interactions with Prince Prospero. The only time he allows himself to react to Prospero’s schemes is when the prince begs mercy for the captive Francesca and even then his reaction is only mild surprise.
The plagues that accompany Death & The Red Death are more or less interchangeable, but there’s an essential difference in Corman & Bergman’s interpretations of the victims’ reactions to the hardship. In both films the plagues are met (at least by some) with a form of naïve celebration, a kind of a party while the ship goes down. In The Masque of the Red Death, this party is a disgusting display, a vilification of opulence. Wealthy party guests assume they are above The Red Death’s inevitability merely by the merit of their breed & fortune. Considering themselves invincible, they shut the poor out of the gates of Prospero’s mansion and party their final hours away in excess. Their thirst for a good time while others suffer is a vile impulse that Corman represents disapprovingly and Vincent Price skillfully amplifies with gusto. As James first said in our Swampchat on The Seventh Seal (and which I later explored in my comparison of the film to Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey), the central couple “Jof and Mia who, while maybe naïve, fully embrace life, family, and art despite the dread and despair that surrounds them. As Jof, Mia, and Mikael are the only characters to survive the film, I think Bergman is trying to say that the only way to conquer the fear of death is to truly embrace life, which makes the film, in my eyes, an ultimately uplifting one.” In Bergman’s viewpoint, celebration in the time of Death is a human ideal. While the celebration in Masque is a hateful sin, the one in The Seventh Seal is a life-saving virtue. Bergman even pushes the idea further by having Jof receive visions from beyond this mortal realm. In some ways his naïve celebration of life is downright divine.
The surprising thing about the differences between Death & The Red Death is that they’re somewhat counterintuitive. As a superficial assumption I would think that The Seventh Seal, a black & white art house drama from Ingmar Bergman, would have been the film that portrayed Death as a somber executioner and the party that surrounds him a crime against man. I would also expect that The Masque of the Red Death, a Vincent Price horror film helmed by camp legend Roger Corman, would be the film that portrayed Death as a playful prankster and the celebration of life that surrounds him a moral asset. Instead, the two films find their respective art house pensiveness & over-the-top camp in other characters & plot devices, the trivial elements that bind them as a pair used for entirely different ends. Although their connection is primarily artificial, our back-to-back discussions of The Seventh Seal & The Masque of the Red Death will forever link them in my mind anyway, both for the ways they are superficially the same and in the considerable ways they differ on a fundamental level.
Every month one of us makes the other two watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month James made Britnee & Brandon watch The Seventh Seal (1957).
James:
Ingmar Bergman’s classic The Seventh Seal was the Swedish auteur’s first major film and helped establish art-house cinema when it won the Special Jury Prize at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival. Set in Europe during the Black Death, the film follows Antonius Block, played by the great Max Von Sydow, as he tries to outwit the personification of Death in a game of chess. The film is now remembered mostly for its historical significance and that iconic image of Death, parodied in movies like Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey and Last Action Hero, rather than its substance. That’s a shame because The Seventh Seal is thematically rich and a masterpiece of cinematography. A jester’s performance interrupted by a procession of the plague stricken. An innocent woman burned at the stake. The Dance of Death. The stark black & white images Bergman presents are haunting, evocative, and foreboding, staying with you long after the final credits.
But watching the film again, I can see why The Seventh Seal isn’t as highly regarded as some of Bergman’s later films. As an art-house film, it is an intellectual, philosophical movie that modern audience might find too heavy and bleak. It also tackles one of the deepest and most disturbing questions of existence: Why, in the face of so much evil, does God remain silent? The Silence of God is a theme Bergman would explore in later films like Through a Glass Darkly and Cries & Whispers but in those films he found more nuanced ways to get his message across. In The Seventh Seal, by contrast, Bergman strips away everything in the story that doesn’t embellish the allegory, making it feel almost like a sermon. And as with most sermons, the effect the film has on you depends greatly on if you are on board with its message. The film’s rejection of religious dogmatism in favor of humanism was something that was very powerful for me when I watched it as a teenager. The scene where Antonius confesses his doubts about God and lines like “In our fear we make an idol and call it God” fed the existential angst of my teenage years but now the film seems somewhat heavy-handed.
Brandon, do you feel the film’s lack of subtlety helps or hurts its overall message?
Brandon:
This may be a result of watching the film with fresh eyes, but the heavy-handed nature of the sermonizing worked for me, if not only because it was backed up by the strength of the film’s images. Death appears very early in the film & his iconic chess match with Max von Sydow’s Antonius is initiated almost right away. Also, the way the film is so conspicuously staged (it was mostly filmed on a studio lot) is mirrored in the traveling theatre troop’s performances, which feels like Bergman intentionally pointing out the artificiality of the world he’s created here. The movie’s honest & explicit about the fact that it’s sermonizing about the fruitlessness of life & The Silence of God and the atmosphere of a stage play is well suited for the task. The brutal imagery of the plague that haunts the proceedings also supports the weight of the lofty subjects discussed throughout. The only element that didn’t land for me was Bergman’s added gallows humor. The line of jokes surrounding the blacksmith’s wife’s affair was particularly flat for me, but ultimately it was so inconsequential in comparison to the towering presence of the film’s ideology & imagery that it didn’t affect my viewing too much.
Speaking of artificiality & stark imagery, it makes total sense that Death’s visage from this film has had such a long life in pop culture. Somewhere between a mime & a wizard, it’s a simple look, but an unnerving one all the same. Just like with last month’s The Masque of the Red Death, Death is portrayed in The Seventh Seal as an indifferent inevitability. The difference between the two portrayals is in Death’s sense of humor & amusement here. He allows himself to be tricked into the iconic chess match with Antonius because it amuses him and later poses as a priest to take the knight’s confession in a church for much of the same reason. The Red Death would never have participated in such tomfoolery. Bergman’s intense focus on portrayals of Death in art are prevalent throughout the film: an artist paints The Dance of Death in a church; the traveling actors wear a Death mask in their play; characters frequently sing about Death, God, and Satan in their leisure time. Even the image of Death playing chess that Bergman chose to portray early in The Seventh Seal is lifted from a real-life Medieval painting by Albertus Pictor, which is acknowledged by the knight in the film. When another knight asks the church painter why he paints images of Death, he responds: “To remind people that they’re going to die,” and reasons that people like to be scared & a skull can be more interesting than a naked woman. The church painter seems to be Bergman’s direct mouthpiece in this scene, an artist standing in for the artist at work.
Britnee, how did you react to the portrayal of Death in this film? Does his playfulness & humor detract from his scariness or only add to it?
Britnee:
I’ve avoided watching The Seventh Seal for years because artsy films about death just aren’t my thing, but I’m glad that Movie of the Month exists because I would’ve never given this remarkable film a chance. The film’s statements about the silence of God were so blunt and direct, which really took me by surprise and left me with some haunting thoughts. The scene with Antonius confessing to the priest, who was actually Death in disguise, was probably my favorite scene because he’s just so honest and genuine throughout his entire rant. My appreciation for his authenticity was at an all-time high at that point. Now, as for Death, I really believe that his humor and silliness most definitely contribute to his scariness. The fact that he’s having a good old time messing with Antonius is definitely creepy because it makes him seem almost human. I think the concept of the uncanny can explain how Death’s humor is terrifying. Humor, silliness, and playfulness are very human-like traits, but while these traits are familiar to us, the forces of Death are quite unfamiliar.
I really enjoyed the connection Antonius had with Jof & Mia. When he watches their family come together, there seems to be a change in his character. Jof, Mia, and their son, Mikael, are a sweet little family with nothing but love for each other, and they are so different from all the other characters Antonius encounters in the film. He is intrigued by their simplicity, morality, and the way they represent a sign of light in a world of darkness. He is waiting and searching for an opportunity to do something that would really give his life meaning, and at the end of the film, he is able to distract Death from taking the lives of Jof & Mia. After reading a couple of articles about the film, I noticed that many compare Jof, Mia, and Mikael to Joseph, Mary, and Jesus. Honestly, I don’t believe that they are direct representations of the Holy Family, but I do think they represent how being simple and virtuous can give meaning to life and make it worth living.
James, what do you think Bergman was trying to portray with the Jof and Mia? What do they symbolize?
James:
You hit the nail on the head when you describe Jof, Mia, and Mikael as a sign of light in a world of darkness and I think, through them, Bergman is trying to articulate his vision for the only real way to “cheat” death. For me, each major character (Antonius, the squire, and Jof and Mia) reacts differently to the “Silence of God” to represent a broader way that human beings deal with Death. There is Antonius, who reacts with anger, disillusionment, and hopelessness; the squire, who seems more cynical but at peace with the absurd nature of being alive; and Jof and Mia who, while maybe naive, fully embrace life, family, and art despite the dread and despair that surrounds them. As Jof, Mia, and Mikael are the only characters to survive the film, I think Bergman is trying to say that the only way to conquer the fear of death is to truly embrace life, which makes the film, in my eyes, an ultimately uplifting one.
Brandon, do you agree with this interpretation? What do the different ways that the characters react to death symbolize to you?
Brandon:
I agree that there is an undeniable dichotomy set up between the way Jof & Mia gaily approach mortality as opposed to Antonius’ unhealthy obsession with it. If no characters were to survive the film, the couple’s final days would have been much more pleasant than Antonius’ fretting over how to cheat his inevitable demise. Even their occupations reflect their relationship with mortality. As a knight, Antonius is duty-bound to interacting with death on a regular, militaristic basis. As traveling performers, Jof & Mia entertain the living, bringing amusement into people’s lives instead of protecting their demise or threatening to end them.
Jof & Mia’s playful, jocular approach to living is contrasted not only by Antonius’ morbid navel-gazing, but also in the interruption of their theatrical performance by a procession of doomsaying monks. If Bergman wasn’t trying to praise the couple’s zest for life through their survival of Death, he at least drew a distinction between their public performance and that of the self-flagellating monks, who basically spoil a pleasant afternoon. As a provider of joy & entertainment, Jof is portrayed as a holy character in the film, one that receives divine visions from beyond the mortal realm. The religious folks & Antonius are more or less party poopers that don’t know how to enjoy a good thing before it’s gone.
Britnee, where do you think Bergman’s film falls on that divide? Does it strive more to provide life-affirming entertainment & encourage joy or does it obsess over the more morbid aspects of the inevitability of our mortality?
Britnee:
I think the film successfully provides a positive view about the rather depressing fact that we are all going die. We all seem to be on the same page when it comes to the Carpe Diem attitude of Jof & Mia, and the couple’s influence on Antonius is what, in my opinion, makes this film fall more into the positive side of the divide. Antonius makes himself sick by obsessing over death and trying to give his life meaning before he cashes in his chips. After witnessing years of brutality as a Crusader and returning home only to find a town filled with Negative Nancys, it’s no wonder why he has no gusto or passion for living. He only seems to be truly happy once he meets Jof & Mia and spends time with them. Bergman makes the couple the standout characters in the film in order to create an optimistic view on life.
Lagniappe
Britnee:
We are all going to die at some point, so living in the moment and not worrying about our inevitable demise is the key to a happy, meaningful life. That’s the main message that I got from The Seventh Seal, and I really didn’t expect to have any positive lingering thoughts from a film best known for its personification of Death. There’s not much action or drama in the film, but the rich symbolism, thought provoking scenes, and intricate themes make up for anything the film may lack. I finally understand why The Seventh Seal is so legendary.
Brandon:
I’d just like to point out that our first few choices for Movie of the Month (The Seventh Seal, The Masque of the Red Death, Blood & Black Lace, and Crimes of Passion) are a pretty morbid group. I wonder if the cold weather’s getting to us. Maybe by the summer it’ll be all Gidget movies and stoner comedies. That being said, The Seventh Seal & The Masque of the Red Death were a pretty great one-two punch in the way they fed off of each other thematically. According to Wikipedia, Roger Corman himself was aware of the thematic similarities, admitting that he delayed the production of Masque because of them. He said, “I kept moving The Masque of the Red Death back, because of the similarities, but it was really an artificial reason in my mind.” Even if it is an artificial connection, they’ll be forever linked in my mind as well, because our back to back conversations about them here covered a lot of the same territory (mostly in our contemplation of an uncaring, inevitable Death).
James:
I thought it was interesting how The Masque of the Red Death and The Seventh Seal share similar themes, but the directors handle them in strikingly different ways. Bergman uses stark black and white images while Corman uses bright colors. Bergman’s dialogue is melodramatic while Corman’s is campy. The contrast really shows the tremendous influence a director’s style has on how we perceive a film. The art-house style of The Seventh Seal makes it feel more important and “deeper”, but, in my opinion, The Masque of the Red Death is the more enjoyable film. Regardless, The Seventh Seal is a bona fide classic and a great introduction to the world of Ingmar Bergman. Can’t wait until next month.
Upcoming Movie of the Months
April: Britnee presents Blood & Black Lace (1964)
May: Brandon presents Crimes of Passion (1984)
Swampflix 