If there’s one thing you remember your favorite character for, it’s probably their death.
Whether it’s in literature, television or film, death scenes are among the most discussed, revisited or replayed in all of culture. Why are we so fascinated by death? Is it our collective fear laid bare for us to comprehend? Or is there a deeper meaning behind our addiction to the last moments of a person’s life?
I recently watched The Fall: Skydive Murder Plot on Channel 4 in the UK. The story of the docudrama – a hybrid between dramatised moments of the characters’ lives and witness accounts from those involved – is that a woman who liked to skydive went for a ‘jump’ and her parachute had been sabotaged by her husband. Somehow, she survived both the fall itself and the fallout from the subsequent court trial, and eventual conviction of said husband.
The three-part documentary was interesting and offered several insights into the life of a person who suffers from their partner abusing them. As such, it doesn’t solely focus on the fall but what happens when someone tries to kill you and fails.
I enjoyed the documentary but watched most of it heavily sunk into my pillow. Near the end, however, they asked the woman in question (who fell to Earth from thousands of feet only to survive) what she felt in that minute or so as she plummeted to the ground at hundreds of feet per second.
At this moment, I sat up and leaned forward, finding myself desperate to hear the answer. Understandably, the moment was utterly mind-scrambling. How could this horrible thing be happening to her? I’ll say right now that the experience would have cured me of the desire to jump out of a plane ever again. Amazingly, she found the courage to do one more jump in tandem with a friend so that her final memories of skydiving weren’t negative. That’s insanely progressive thinking to me.
Anyway, the woman then described how a flash of her children’s faces came into her mind as she was about to hit the ground and that really struck me. We see it a lot on television and film, that moment before someone is killed, and often it’s a shocking realisation. I’ll probably never get over the first time I watched the ‘Red Wedding’ scene in Game of Thrones, for example.
What does someone think about in the moment before they move from this life into the next?
That comprehension of imminent death fascinates us because (unless we’re this woman who fell to Earth) we have no clue about what its actually like to feel death coming and know exactly that the moment is about to happen… then survive. We don;t get to come back and tell everyone what it was like.
Whenever I think of a TV character’s death that really shocked me, it is this moment of contemplation that I find most disturbing, the most horrifying, yet oddly most hypnotic. I will their deaths not to happen - even on replay! - like I’m somehow able to change it. As if, if I watch it a hundredth time, John Corbett (above) won’t get his throat slit in Line of Duty or Dewey won’t end his days in a hallway bleeding out in Scream (I won’t tell you which one).
The most harrowing example of this moment that I’ve almost been unable to watch yet every time it is screened cannot turn away from is from the film Saving Private Ryan. It always mystified me that people virtually never mentioned the scene in question when the film was released. The beach landing scene is immensely powerful. It lasts half an hour and is probably the most incredible scene ever captured on film that is based on real life. I get why it’s the scene from Saving Private Ryan that people keep coming back to.
For me, however, Mellish dying in the town assault at the end of the movie is far, far scarier.
We’ve got to know the character of Mellish by this point in a way that we haven’t been able to know anyone in the opening scene. We understand him, we get the whole squad’s underdog mentality after two hours of watching them struggle to the final stages of their redemption mission.
In finding this YouTube clip of the moment I’m talking about, I couldn’t even bear to look at it (then did so).
Here it is.
It’s one soldier stabbing each other in a knife fight after their guns have run out of ammo, a situation that I imagine happened frequently in WWII. It’s a desperate struggle for life that ends with Mellish dying at it the very hand of a weapon he stole from a German.
Mellish held onto the Hitler Youth Knife because it represented the oppression his race of people has suffered. When we see him cry, then turn on captured Nazis who pass him, saying ‘Juden’ as they go by him, our hearts fill up.
In the final fight where he dies, all that feeling we have for him is brutally punished as the German soldier slides the blade through his shirt and into his heart while Mellish protests at him to stop.
The SS soldier says (in untranslated speech) “Give up, you have no chance. Let us end this. It's easier for you, way easier. You will see, it's over in a moment.”
Those are the most horrendous words never to be translated.
One person is telling another that they are about to die, then executing that death themselves. It’s so heartless and brutal and unforgiving. It’s hypnotic and heartbreaking. It’s unbearable yet transfixing.
It is death – the great obsession of our culture in so many films and TV series we love, such as Squid Game or The Matrix. Let alone books! Our favourite character dying can produce a gasp and a provoke the clutching together of the book’s pages as if we can prevent that death from happening if we just try to forget what we just read.
There is no drama like death because it is the one part of life we don’t understand. We can’t. We’re not there yet, in death. And unless we survive a parachute fall or cheat our demise in another way, we’re unlikely to ever know.
We haven’t a clue.
Maybe that’s why we all love to see it played out in front of our eyes.