Can Art Perform in the Face of Death?

The Family Stone

The Family Stone

Film Friday – 2010 in Review

One of my favorite holiday films is the comic melodrama Family Stone (2008), the story of a family’s Christmas reunion. Despite their determination to put on a happy front, the family must face up to a number of underlying tensions. Foremost among these is the mother’s terminal cancer, which prevents the family from camping out in its customary avoidance.

I know it’s a bit of a jump but, on this last day of 2010, I am going to use the film as an occasion to look back over my own encounters with illness and death. Because I lost some good friends, observed the 10-year anniversary of the death of my oldest son Justin, and am watching another close friend dying of cancer, 2010 has been a particularly poignant year. As a result, certain films have hit with particular force, most notably two that I posted on, the Japanese film Departures and Toy Story 3.

Departures, winner of the 2008 foreign language film Oscar, is about a young man who violates family and social traditions to enter the seemingly distasteful profession of preparing corpses for burial. Toy Story 3 is about the end of childhood, which means that the toys face death by garage sale, attic storage, donation, or dumpster. (“Yes, I know we’ve lost some friends along the way,” Woody says at one point, pausing a moment to remember Bo-Peep.) Both films are remarkably sensitive treatments of issues we’d just as soon not face up to.

Both films also do what the best Christmas films do, which is find hope in the face of darkness. As I said in my post last Friday about It’s a Wonderful Life, lighting candles on the longest night of the year is what Christmas is all about.

The Family Stone hits me hard because the Stones resemble my own family in a number of ways. The Stones are liberal, accepting without question their gay son and his African American partner. (We don’t have anyone who is gay but my two sons are both in mixed race relationships.) Like the family Stone we have an oldest son who is very concerned about making his parents proud of him (that would be me). We have a second son who has felt alienated from the family upon occasion but who may be the most sensitive of us all. We have a prickly daughter-in-law who feels out of place and overwhelmed by the Bateses but who nevertheless wants to be accepted and who has (like the Jessica Parker character) found a place for herself. We too have a warm-hearted professor father who thinks that the force of his benevolence can, in and of itself, override any tensions running through the family. (Actually, it’s not only my father who believes this—it’s been a defining characteristic of Bates males for generations.)

Fortunately, we differ in one important respect from the film: both of my parents, now in their 80’s, are relatively healthy.

The prospect of impending death gives The Family Stone its particular power. And (shifting gears now) the presence of illness and death in my own life over the past twelve months has added a certain resonance.

Death and dying pose the ultimate challenge to this website’s contention that literature can help us with our lives. I sometimes wonder aloud to my students, “Can literature perform in crunch time?” and death and cancer are definitely crunch time. I would ask the same about all art forms, including film. Here are some of my 2010 attempts to answer that question.

With my friend and former philosophy colleague Alan Paskow dying of terminal cancer, I found myself writing about Margaret Edson’s play W;t with a special urgency. (The first of a series of posts can be found here.) On the surface, Edson answers my question in the negative: John Donne’s poetry seems less effective than a children’s story in providing final ease to a dying Donne scholar.

A month later I returned to the play and, alluding to the famous Donne sonnet, asked, “Should death be proud or not?” My answer was that Donne didn’t convince me that he is altogether sure of himself when he asserts, “Death, thou shalt die!” In fact, he strikes me as a man desperately trying to convince himself. If this is true, then (in the terms set up by the poem) death can indeed be proud. But in the post I also cited an instance of where the poem gave a father courage to survive the death of his child. So the jury is out.

I also noted that, even in W;t, literature comes to the rescue in the end: the play’s final comforting words, words that help the patient die in peace, come from Hamlet.

Throughout the year I used literature to examine many of the facets of dying. Sometimes Alan’s wrangles with doctors and hospitals reminded me of Kafka’s The Trial. I wrote at one point that Alan called to mind Odysseus, heroically surmounting obstacle after obstacle—to which Alan protested that he felt more like Holden Caulfield, an ironic rather than an epic hero. Many times Alan and I used literature to talk about his illness, at one point examining a Dom DeLillo short story about uncertainty, at another a D. H. Lawrence poem about whether self or love go deeper, at yet another a Lucille Clifton poem about the way couples can blame each other when one of them is dying. In one post I noted that Alan was facing death like Sir Gawain rather than Prince Prospero (in “The Masque of the Red Death”). Prospero tries to wall death out and engages in desperate partying (avoidance) whereas Gawain, while not happy about his impending death, nevertheless comes to see new possibilities in life.

I turned to poetry to cope when my friends died. James Baldwin helped me with poet Lucille Clifton, a long-time colleague at St. Mary’s college. I was also moved at how, in a memorial service, each of Lucille’s daughters invoked a particular poem by their mother that was helping her make it through her grief.

When Maurine Holbert Hogaboom, a 98-year-old actress, lapsed into a coma and never recovered, a passage from The Odyssey helped sooth my hurt:

Then a seaborne death
soft as this hand of mist will come upon you
when you are wearied out with rich old age,
your country folk in blessed peace around you
. . .

We, the friends who stood in for family, were all around Maurine in blessed peace.

When my uncle Rob died, it somehow helped to think of him as my mother’s little brother and recall A Wrinkle in Time, where a big sister summons up the courage to protect her own little brother.  I was also honored when students shared their own stories.  For instance, Erica Rutkai wrote about how Beowulf helped her handle grieving over her mother’s death.

Finally, when remembering Justin, I called on two poems by Lucille as we sailed into the St. Mary’s River in a replica of the Dove, the 17th century guide boat that had accompanied the early Maryland settlers. We cast flowers into the water in memory of both Justin and Maurine so that the three of them were, in a way, brought together. They would have liked that because all three appreciated each other.

It also comforted me, in one post, to recall the lullaby that I sang to Justin when we first recovered his body. The protagonist in Departures embraces a profession his society finds disgusting when he realizes that our leave taking must involve ritual and ceremony. Writing about the lullaby on the 10-year anniversary became a form of leave taking.

So do literature and film perform at crunch time? They didn’t bring Justin back to life and ten years later the hurt hasn’t entirely gone away. In that regard, language will always be inadequate. But as I wrote in one post, the mere fact that poetry can take us beyond ourselves means that there is more to reality than material existence and the end of existence. One such poem came to mind on April 30, 2010, the 10th anniversary. Mary Oliver’s “Humpbacks” so perfectly captures Justin’s exuberant spirit, his love for life in all its sensuality, that I recommend you visit my post on it. Here is how it concludes:

Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body,

its spirit
longing to fly while the dead-weight bones

toss their dark mane and hurry
back into the fields of glittering fire

where everything,
even the great whale,
throbs with song.

The poem intermingles spiritual dreaming and sensual here-and-now life so inextricably that one cannot separate them. When I get caught up in such works I can really believe, borrowing from Dylan Thomas, that death has no dominion.  Because of art, I know that Justin, Lucille, Maurine, and Rob are not entirely gone.

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