When was the last time you saw a movie death that looked real?
Not that many of us would know what a real killing looks like, but I haven’t been moved by a single Hollywood death event, ever. Shooting, falling, mangling, suicide, etc,. Nothing I have seen has ever stirred me to make a comment regarding the authenticity of the death.
They either seem too overdone, too red, or too cookie cut.
What could Hollywood do to create the kind of stir and horror we feel when we see actual dead persons or photos of dead persons? Maybe it’s the feeling that we know the death is staged so we’re going to react a certain way, whereas when we see a depiction of an actual (or purported to be an actual death) death our minds believe that what we are looking at is a real dead person. I think much of this is in the way our minds percieve it. If we’re in a movie atmosphere and someone is killed we know right away it’s fake. If we look at a picture of a dead person on the internet we can always think to ourselves that it could be fake and thus not bothered by it as much. If someone presents an image of a dead person to you and claims it to be real you have a different reaction to it.
Having said all that, is there any way that Hollywood can create a more realistic death, or are we stuck with the tired old, over and over again, worn out Hollywood death?
I’ve never seen anyone die a violent death (thank God), so I can’t add anything there.
The most realistic death natural death I’ve ever seen was actually in “Terms of Endearment,” where Debra Winger just sort of shuddered and was dead. No long speeches, no deathbed confession, just a shudder and then dead.
I read an article once about this, written by a doctor, and he said the most convincing last line of a death scene would actually be, “Damn, my chest is killing me.”
“same old death”? I’ve seen lots of death scenes, with a considerable amount of variety. Some look pretty realistic, especially banal ones. Some are deliberately over-the-top. (“Moe Green” in The Godfather).
Real death is usually banal and anticlimactic. Someone just stops breathing, and that’s it.
Some time ago, a poster had a link to film of a senator (his name escapes me) who committed suicide during a press conference. Gun in the mouth, pull the trigger. I’d never seen an actual death before, and it was surprising. Very little blood, no spasms, no reaction at all, really. Just a sudden collapse straight down, like the proverbial marionette with cut strings.
Yes, it does. I was trying to think of a movie that had some realistic death scenes and couldn’t come up with any, but now that you mentioned it… What made the death scenes in that movie realistic? I can’t quite place my finger on it.
I seem to recall that most of the deaths were fast and free of drama, probably similar to real battle action deaths.
Correct, nothing like it. IIRC, in that video (which I also saw) the guys eyes stayed open and sort of stared blankly ahead for some time and then closed. There was blood but you had to look close to see it.
That vidoe stunned me. Nothing in Hollywood has.
That was R. “Bud” Dwyer, state treasurer of Pennsylvania. His suicide was the result of his having been convicted on several criminal counts. He insisted to the end that he was innocent.
They’ve already done it. “The Body”, an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Real death is horrible because it’s so very not dramatic. You call 911, they walk you through CPR, and it doesn’t work. Your mother is dead, yet you wander the house aimlessly waiting for the ambulance to get there. You open the back door, and hear children playing two yards over, and birds singing in your oak tree, and you can’t figure out why everything is so damn ordinary. How dare they just keep playing and singing? You turn around and throw up all over your cheap imitation Persian rug from Target, and then fumble for the paper towels, because if you don’t clean it up, Mom will be mad. Then you remember, Mom won’t be mad. Mom’s dead. Holy shit, Mom’s dead! Where is the ambulance already? What’s taking so long?
We don’t see the actual death, because the actual death isn’t what’s so horrifying. It’s everything immediately after.
Movie stiffs seldom look realistic. Having spent some time as a mortuary worker and a volunteer fireman, I’ve seen a good many dead people…some of them “messier” than others. Just for starters, actors playing dead typically close their eyes and look more-or-less asleep. The dead that I’ve seen usually had their eyes partially open and the facial features had a pecularly slack look that I’ve never seen in a living person.
I think you’re remembering the case of R. Budd Dwyer, the state treasurer of Pennsylvania who was convicted in a kick-back scandal. On January 22, 1987 (the day before he was to be sentenced), Dwyer called a press conference, made a statement protesting his innocence, handed a few envelopes (which turned out to be a suicide note, organ donor card, and letter) to aides, then pulled a gun out of another envelope and committed suicide in front of the assembled reporters (live on the air on some stations).
The death at the beginning of Meet Joe Black struck me as realistic.
Instead of the person being hit by the car and being bounced away, the physics are proper and the the body is forced into a spin when the legs are hit by the moving vehicle, then bounced into the air by the cabin-bump.
Though, it may have just struck me as such for not being a cookie-cutter Hollywood representation and perhaps really is unrealistic. I have no expertise in the area.
As to how to make the deaths look more real…the only one I can think of is in terms of things like knife wounds, where the skin looks like sliced cheese. http://www.pathguy.com/~tdemark/0050.jpg -> Example. With make-up effects you either have to build up from the body or attach a fake limb or such to the actor, which always looks fake. CGI may make this become possible–if they wouldn’t just be worried about the audience leaving the film midway through.
I’ve seen Dwyer’s death, and I saw one recently of a guy who was arrested and brought into questioning and somehow got a gun in there. He asked for some water. The cop handed him a bottle then walked away. The guy took a drink, put the cap on and set the bottle on the table. Then he pulled the gun out, stuck it in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and his head flopped (sideways or forward, I don’t remember). Nothing dramatic, and the cops weren’t all freaking out. (You could hear some “holy shits,” and stuff, but no screaming and yelling and waving their hands in the air.)
Why doesn’t Hollywood use Death Row inmates who have exhausted their appeals for death scenes in movies? Much like how they employ stuntmen to film dangerous stunts, they could really amp up the realism with real actual deaths! I think that’s what they did in Ancient Greece, killing convicted criminals in public plays where the stories and myths called for characters dying.
Well, yes, I know they show a lot. It’s just that there’s…um…a LOT of blood involved in major arterial wounds.
I saw a RL case of a guy cutting his arm on plate glass, right across the wrist. He was drunk and punched a window.
His buddy took one look at him and then grabbed him and applied direct pressure. Within seconds the wound was stanched and the victim was hustled off to a medical building a few hundred yards away.
The pool of bright red blood he left behind was FIVE FEET ACROSS. He’d only bled for a few seconds.
I’ve never seen that much blood in movies or TV, not even from katana beheadings, not from Kurosawa or Tarantino.
And there’s a good reason for it.
Moviemakers may be bad or good storytellers, but they are consciously trying to tell a story. A shockingly large amount of blood drenching everything is so viscerally compelling, it completely dominates your attention. If they showed a realistic beheading, the audience would take minutes or hours to return to a state in which they are following the storyline. I know we did little else for the whole evening after the incident I recounted above.
Not to mention that what you describe would look completely over the top on screen. Think Kill Bill where she fights the Crazy 88. Gangs of New York had a few blood spraying moments too.
I’d say there’s always going to be a gap between movie death and real death, unless we start really killing people for movies, in which case the hell with us.
My dog died Friday morning, and that’s essentially how it went for me, with the difference that (I think) Joyce Summers’s death was surprising. I broke down and cried frequently over the next few hours - and unfortunately it was about four hours, since nobody else could make it home for that long - but when I wasn’t crying or doing something death-related, like cleaning up or talking to my parents to figure out what to do, things were normal. The weather was very nice, and when I could see straight, I had to try and waste time like I normally might, since I couldn’t spend the entire time weeping and waiting. It was dizzying.
Back to the movies, the most affecting death I’ve ever seen - I don’t know if it’s realistic - is Kevin Spacey’s in L.A. Confidential. The life just goes out of his face, and there’s something very shocking and haunting about it.
Hollywood also has a problem with realistic suicides. We could probably all name several examples where a character shoots him or herself in the head and dies with maybe a little blood on the side of the head, nothing more. I realize that a more realistic depiction would be, at best, nauseating, but suicides like Claire Danes’s at the end of Romeo + Juliet (no spoiler needed there, I hope!) are so obviously unrealistic that it’s almost equally distracting.
