What Movies Taught Me About Grief and What Grief Taught Me About Life
Bruce Springsteen tells us to meet him “in the land of hopes and dreams” from the steps of the Lincoln Monument, the blackness stretched before him punctured by soft yellow lights, runwaying themselves along the reflecting pool, pointing towards the Washington Monument, each light an American, dead from Coronavirus.
The new President swears in and tells us, “Few people in our nation’s history have been more challenged or found a time more challenging or difficult than the time we’re in now. Once-in-a-century virus that silently stalks the country. It’s taken as many lives in one year as America lost in all of World War II“.
We move out of buildings and cancel school as we prepare for a verdict we are almost expecting to be unjust. Not only because of the history of the country we live in, but because it seems almost impossible to get true justice for a Black man lynched on camera, in the middle of the street, in the middle of the country, in the middle of the day, by the people who are supposed (as in, supposedly there) to protect us.
Americans have experienced an unfathomable amount of grief in the last year.
The amount of Black men we’ve seen lynched by our police – or by random White men in trucks who were then not prosecuted until the footage, which they themselves filmed, was released – is enough to make you cry every few days.
We watched our President tell his followers to attack our Senate, our Democracy, to stop the counting of the votes we had cast to remove him.
We watched Coronavirus near fatalities we haven’t seen as a country since the American Civil War (620,000-750,000) or, though a century later – particularly, a century in which virtually all of the virus and germ science as we know today was developed – as the Spanish Flu (estimated 675,000 Americans).
Like many sources of pain in America, it was unnecessary. Or I should say, like many sources of pain in America, it is necessary in order for the ruling-class-rich to continue to grow their wealth.
We have lost more lives than World War II so that the 664 billionaires of America could grow their collective wealth by 1.4 Trillion, a 43% increase since the pandemic began.
That is the kind of fact that makes a devastating amount of grief, into a completely staggering amount of grief. It’s the kind of fact that leaves you grabbing for a railing, should you learn it mid-flight of steps.
The effects of this level of loss on our collective psyches is going to take a long time to understand, much less recover from, if we’re ever able to recover from it.
On my personal psyche? I take to movies, to writing about movies, to remember what grief has taught me about life, and what movies have taught me about grief.
Nothing Just Happens, Everything Just Happens
We live in a time where the highest grossing movie of all-time, which also happens to be the pinnacle of the largest film franchise in history, takes an entire hour out of it’s 3-and-a-half to focus on grief.
The entire first act of Avengers: End Game (2019) is more or less group therapy, a quick revenge murder-trip across the galaxy, and eating snacks.
End Game certainly didn’t portend the Coronavirus, but its imagery is eerily similar now: empty highways, “the before times”, and unimaginable loss all around. As eerie as it is, it is oddly comforting to go back and re-watch.
But of all the films in the last decade or so Jackie trapped us in grief like no other.
Jackie shocked us, in the medical sense of the term. It froze us in the body of Jacquelyn Kennedy Onassis and walked us around in her bloody dress for hours.
Throughout the entirety of Jackie not one person around the bereaved Onassis – and therefore, no one around us the viewer – gives her the attention or consideration we would assume a widow, much less a widow of the United States of America, who was present and very much a witness to her husdand’s bloody murder, would be deserving of, until she talks with a (spoiler alert, I guess, kind of) priest towards the end of the film.
Jackie Kennedy’s faith in God was shaken to the core by the assassination of her husband.
“I think god’s unjust now” she told historian Arthur Schlesinger, and even asked Father McSorley, as Vanity Fair recounts, if God would separate her from her husband if she killed herself.
The real Jacquelyn Kennedy is well within her rights to be angry at God, but maybe there should be more than God available to the grieving. Especially with, you know, so many people around.
On the day Jackie’s husband was killed did not one doctor review her mental state? If they did, we don’t see it in Jackie. And even if 1 medical professional, or even a few adult people, sat down with the suddenly-former First Lady for a minute of evaluation, one hundred adults that day, did not. Jackie numbs us with these 100. On the day her husband was brutally murdered in front of her, handlers ushered Mrs. Kennedy Onassis around all day, passing her from one set of politicians to another, making sure she was where she should be so the country could keep moving.
If that was the experience of Jacquelyn Kennedy or not, Jackie puts us inside grief itself. Inside the shock, and then isolation, that immediately follows the tragedy.
Jackie reminds us that grief is lonely, even when it is shared by a nation.
After all, at every funeral there are people deflecting their sorrow at someone more immediate to the deceased (I’m sad, but I feel really bad for the…).
The George Clooney-ledThe Descendants (2011) tells us there is grief in knowing the truth, their is grace in lying, and there are enough Hawaiian shirts to go around. It tells us we don’t chose who we miss, or how much we miss them.
When we lose someone we have to confront them, and all they were to us, all at once.
“You are my joy, you are my pain…goodbye”.
In Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), as “Tupperware Tarantino” is it may have been, we are told grief is, predominantly, meant to be avenged. Grief kicks teenagers in the nuts and throws grown men out second floor windows.
Women getting their violent revenge is the latest in grief-on-film trends. Widows (2018) absorbs us in revenge, so as to create a macguffin out of grief, the way Tyrese and crew did for the masculine gender in Brothers (2009).
Hereditary (2018) implies grief will tear your psyche a part. Demolition (2015) says grief will tear apart everything around you, using you as a conduit. Every appliance, every door hinge, ever commuter train at rush hour will make you want “to rip it apart and spread it out all over the floor”.
Despite the tragedy at its core Demolition has a kind of lowkey I Heart Huckabees love story vibe, a magnetic Naomi Watts performance uniting both films. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, of Dallas Buyers Club and Wild, Demolition is better than both. If it’s unsure of where it’s going at times, Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance earns it: he falls apart just like every piece of his impeccable suit replaced one-by-one over the course of the film.
Demolition appeals to the parts of us that want to blow up our lives, that want to be unburdened from all the rules our decisions have made for us. The film tells us grief might make us think we should all start not-giving-a-fuck (“I want to be able to do what you do” the sad Watts tells the Haalster, “to be completely honest”), but what we will really get is an angry, self-destructive not-giving-a-fuck that will have us driving heavy machinery into our house before it’s done with us. “We’re tearing a part my marriage” Gyllenhaal says to the teenage son of Watts – played in a breakout turn by Judah Lewis – as he takes sledgehammer to desk, to kitchen counter.
The Dakota Johnson/Jason Segal/Mark Ruffalo-led 2019 film Our Friends is in that sub-genre of grief films that may be hardest to watch: the cancer film.
Where Steel Magnolias (1989) balances out the heavy heaviness of cancer with humor, and Terms of Endearment (1983) gives us Jack Nicholson roof-driving a ’78 corvette along the beach, Our Friends goes all-in on the heavy cream.
If a movie is going to be really, really difficult to watch, it has to really, really earn it.
By the end of Our Friends we were just like, “this needs to end, I need to be done with this, and watching SNL, is it new this week? I swear, we google this every wee- oh god, Our Friends is still on”.
Monster’s Ball tells us grief is enough to make you have sex with Billy Bob Thornton. Grief is reckless. I have not experienced that level of grief, personally.
“If Anything Happens I Love You” (2020) reminds us there are often no words for grief. And that comforting those who are hurting, doesn’t require them.
3 Things Grief Has Taught Me
There was a period in my late twenties in which I attended 5 funerals in 18 months. 2 uncles, 2 friends, a grandfather. 2 suicides among them, one motorcycle accident.
At that time in my life friends were moving away, or settling down, or, it seemed, dying. Either way, they were leaving me. In that way, my grief made me selfish: everyone should stay put until I am ready for them to leave.
Or at least, in that way, grief centered my pain. Grief positioned itself so that my pain was the starting point for every conversation, the filter through which I processed every situation.
Grief is by its very existence a terrible thing. I am sure I haven’t experienced the worst of it.
But there are a few things I have tried to learn from it.
1. “Everyone grieves differently. There is no right way and there is no wrong way”.
Thunder Road (2018) is one of those movies where you can feel, as you’re watching it, that it’s the beginning of something. It’s Foot Fist Way but with real, raw heart. Jim Cummings is a breakthrough the way Vince Vaughn in Swingers was a breakthrough if Vince Vaughn had also directed Swingers and, while directing, displayed truly staggering range as an actor.
“Everyone grieves differently. There is no right way and there is no wrong way”, is played for laughs in the film (successfully), but it is truly something I learned from grief.
However you react is how you react.
If you go to work, if you don’t. If you get out of bed, if you don’t. If you can’t stop crying, if you can’t start. If you’re breaking down in tears, or inappropriate laughter. It’s all ok.
And just as importantly, it is ok to exist in a state where you are not primarily concerned with other people’s reactions to you.
2. Maybe we should all, always be allowed to react however we react.
If our feelings are ok when we’re grieving, why aren’t they ok the rest of the time?
As someone with social anxiety, grief taught me to put in the background my anticipation of other people’s reactions to me, and to bring forward my own emotions and needs to express them.
Not saying that everything we do when grieving is ok or even healthy, far from it.
But social anxiety, some have studied, may be based on a preoccupation with a fear of making mistakes.
Grief exempts you from expectations, while reminding you that you never really had it altogether to begin with. It reminds me that there aren’t really that many mistakes to be made, that perfection was never possible.
And there is strength -or a freedom at least – in knowing you’re going to make mistakes, no matter what you do.
3. Funerals are foundational to being human
I had a close friend die a few years ago. “Close” is always relative, I suppose.
He was a once-best friend, now-rarely seen friend. He died from an overdose. His family chose a small, intimate service. That was absolutely their right.
But I learned, from not going to this funeral, that grieving along with others who are grieiving the same loss as us, is foundational to being a human. Seeing and being with others sharing in your grief, is a need that went a lot deeper than I could have anticipated.
I wanted to be around people who missed him the way I missed him. Everyone around me said they were sorry for what I was going through. I wanted them to be sorry he was gone. That shared grief allows the healing to start, without it, we stumble out of the blocks.
In Threes
When my uncle died last month, a 30-man choir sang at his funeral.
When I heard my co-worker had died suddenly, just the night before, I had to jump on and lead a conference call.
When my cat Caylee died in the middle of the night last week, we rushed her to the University of Minnesota Veterinary Medical Center where it was all they could do to euthanize her.
She was 17, and had lived with me for the last 9 years.
Caylee had a close call about 6 weeks ago. It didn’t look like she would make it through.
But she did. And I was lucky to have those last 6 weeks, now knowing that our time was limited.
I mean, we all know our time is limited. But also, we don’t.
As I complained to my fiancee this weekend, “if I have to hear one more Hollywood story telling me how great a gift mortality is, I’m gonna lose it”.
I was joking to her but only so far as jokes are funny because they’re true.
Death is so final, life is temporary. And grief makes that very, very clear.