Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

JENNY

It doesn’t hurt, Ollie, really it doesn’t. It’s like falling off a cliff in slow motion, you know? Only after a while you wish you’d hit the ground already, you know?

And I am so relieved — the idea of falling in slow motion is too abstract for me to grasp, but I do grasp it doesn’t hurt . It is my father’s deft removal of a splinter, the squeeze of a soothing, nonstinging antiseptic cream on a skinned knee, and yes, finally, everything is okay now.

JENNY

Would you please do something for me, Oliver? Would you please hold me? I mean really hold me, next to me.

So Oliver reclines on the bed beside her, the camera hovering respectfully above, gazing down upon this pretty young couple in a final but eternal moment of grace. What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That her death— and her dying — was beautiful, peaceful, a lovely and loving thing. My mother is sobbing, but for me, their last embrace, his anguish and her crooked-tooth beauty, are all wonderful, the perfect end; it is Jenny’s tragic-heroine death, after all, that makes this tale bestseller special, creates a blockbuster film, that makes a story of their pretty snowflake love.

My mother and I also watched Dark Victory on late-night television together — she was a crazy Bette Davis fan, and I’d already seen Mr. Skeffington and the duckling-to-lonely-swan Now, Voyager , had already fallen in love myself with those plummy, saucery Bette Davis eyes. 66In Dark Victory , Bette is spoiled, fun-loving Society Gal Judith, who suddenly gets dreadful headaches, can’t manage the hand-eye coordination to light her own cigarette or remember yesterday’s bridge game. The handsome Dr. Steele (George Brent, who I get is meant to be handsome but has a silly pencil moustache) diagnoses her with a brain tumor , but I am as mystified by that phrase as I was by Jenny’s unexplained blood problem. Judith is self-defensively defiant:

JUDITH

I’m well! I’m well! I’m young and strong and nothing can touch me!

But Dr. Steele insists on surgery, the need to snip out this problematic thing in her head:

DR. STEELE

After all, the brain’s like any other part of the body. Things get out of kilter, and have to be adjusted. . Technically, it’s called a _____[word I can’t catch, maybe not even a real scientific term]. It is rather like a plant. A parasitic one.

The night before surgery, Judith is agitated and petulant, complaining about her dreary hospital gown and her biggest concern:

JUDITH

Will they cut off my hair?

DR. STEELE

Just a little bit.

JUDITH

I don’t want my hair cut off.

DR. STEELE

(stating the obvious, yet reassuring) It’ll grow back. .

And after the surgery, it clearly was just a “little bit”—she now wears a series of small pointy beanies over her tumbling curls, which I suppose are meant to be both fashionable and cover what must be an infinitesimal brain surgery scar. But the pathological findings are bad; there will be a recurrence, perhaps as soon as ten months, and Judith is absolutely going to die.

DR. STEELE

A girl like that, so alive! So entitled to live! And this thing, this growth comes along and puts a period to it! Makes you almost wish it happened on the table. .

Judith’s best friend Ann is devastated, worried about the return of the headaches, about Judith suffering, about that “ghastly confusion.” But Dr. Steele reassures her (and me):

DR. STEELE

No, she’s not going to suffer anymore. That’s all behind her. . that’s the freakish nature of this thing. She’ll seem well and normal, just like everybody else.

BEST FRIEND ANN

How will it come?

DR. STEELE

Quietly, peacefully.

BEST FRIEND ANN

God’s last small mercy. Will she have no warning? No chance to be ready?

DR. STEELE

There may be a moment near the end when her sight may not be quite as good as usual. A dimming of vision. Then a few hours, perhaps three or four. .

They agree she mustn’t know, and this is bizarre to me, to keep something like that from the dying someone; I assume getting “ready” to die means tidying up her room and saying good-bye to people, but how can she do that if she doesn’t know “some growth” is about to put a period to the end of her life? But meanwhile Judith and the doctor fall madly in love, and so when she does find out about PROGNOSIS NEGATIVE — the words leaping out of the file she snoops into, swelling up on-screen to meet us in an alarming font — she feels doubly betrayed, goes back to her old partying ways, and is generally bitter and bitchy until Dr. Steele confronts her:

DR. STEELE

Judy! I want you to find peace! We all have to die. The tragic difference is that you know when, and we don’t. The important thing is the same for all of us: To live our lives so we can meet death when it comes, beautifully and finely!

Which convinces her, No, she “can’t die like this! When it comes, it must be met beautifully and finely,” yes! She marries her handsome doctor, and they live in Vermont for a few beautiful and fine months. Then one bright sunny day Judith comments there must be a storm coming, “Look how it’s clouding up, getting darker by the second. . funny, I can still feel the sun on my hands. .,” and she and we realize the punctuation that is her grammatical moment of death has come at last. She sends her doctor/husband away without telling him she has gone blind in the past five minutes and gracefully, resolutely climbs the stairs to her bedroom alone in her darkness, prays briefly, then reclines, one arm glamorously extended above her head, looking heroically beautiful, those now-dimming Bette Davis eyes as serene as Jenny’s. Celestial music swells, the angels sing, and the screen goes to a soft blur, inviting us to identify with Judith’s gentle, unraging exit into the good night of her dark victory. Fade to black, the end, THE END. My mother, again, is sobbing, and I realize it is sad, of course—“a girl like that, so entitled to live!”—but I am again primarily reassured; death is painless and glamorous, quiet and peaceful. A moment of ultimate beauty and fineness, indeed.

Death is also something to be orchestrated, planned for: I see Harold and Maude in 1971, when I am seven, and am intrigued by eighteen-year-old Harold’s theatrical faux-suicide tableaux (hanging, self-immolation, etc.), his investment in death as spectacle; I am not a child to act out, myself, but there is something in his seeking an insistent affirmation of his existence by dangling his death in front of people — especially his histrionic, self-absorbed mother — that touches me in a way I feel but don’t really understand. 67I’m also delighted by perky septuagenarian Maude (Ruth Gordon; please, please, let me be Ruth Gordon when I am an old, purple-wearing woman) and the January-December love affair with Harold (Bud Cort, angel-faced nerd), a relationship whose idiosyncratic tenderness engages me more than Oliver and Jenny’s formulaic quipping. And it is ultimately Maude’s death that stays with and inspires me; when Harold throws her a daisy-decorated birthday party/marriage proposal, Maude is so moved: