APRIL 1996. SITTING IN A MOVIE THEATRE at the Carlton Cinema in Toronto, watching director Bruce McDonald’s darkly comic rock ‘n’ road film Hard Core Logo. The mock documentary traces the archetypal rise and fall of a punk band, complete with clashing egos, artistic dissonance, chaotic if-it’s-Tuesday-it-must-be-Saskatoon lifestyle, sleazy music-business double-crosses, and drug and alcohol abuse. It’s scuzzy territory, similar to what Daniel explored in his novel 1978. Indeed, we are told in the film that the fictional band Hard Core Logo, originally the creation of Vancouver author Michael Turner, whose novel bears the same name, launched itself that year. Depending on how you view it, it was punk’s zenith, or nadir.
The film seems like the mother of all Daniel sightings to me. The band’s Mohawk-hairstyled, ear-pierced lead singer, Joe Dick—played by Hugh Dillon, real-life lead singer of The Headstones—bears an extraordinary resemblance to Daniel, or so it seemed to me at the time. It’s partly projection on my part; with a full head of hair, Dillon’s likeness would probably fade. As with beards, there is something levelling about even semi-baldness in men, a standard-issue masculine quality that emerges when the pate is exposed just as when the lip and jawline are covered. It seems to me virtually all fair-skinned bald men could pass for Mr. Clean at a glance. The first time I saw a picture of the bearded Unabomber, I thought of several hundred slightly unconventional teachers and folk singers I have encountered over the years, not to mention Charles Manson and assorted scruffy delusionals and psychotics. It’s some kind of universal male template, give or take a few variations in eye colour and facial structure.
In this case, it isn’t just the exposed scalp, but also the character’s demeanor, even in some uncanny way the inner life the actor intimates that reminds me so much of a certain side of Daniel: the edgy, revved-up intelligence, the fraught energy reined in by some powerful, unexpressed fear that someone might get hurt—we know not whom—the self-contempt masquerading as irreverence and cynicism, the ambivalence about success, and ultimately, the huge emotional vulnerability. It’s disconcerting, yet mesmerizing, as this spectre moves in one slow-motion scene across the screen, sunglasses obliterating harrowingly sensitive eyes, mouth curled in the quintessential rebel’s sneer, the gait a languorous, loose-limbed swagger.
By the end of the film, I’ve acclimatized somewhat to the look-alike effect and have become absorbed in the plot. Then, in the film’s final scene, the camera tracks a jumpy, plastered Joe Dick out to the sidewalk in front of the hall where he and the band have just performed, apparently for the last time, having ended the show with a violent onstage explosion of hostilities that have festered for years between Dick and his best-buddy guitarist Billy Tallent. The latter has announced he is jumping ship (a ship that is sinking anyway, if only Dick would grow up and admit it) to pursue fame and fortune with a high-profile American band. In the middle of being interviewed, Dick pulls a handgun from the pocket of his coat, shoots himself in the head, and falls, blood pouring onto the sidewalk, to the gasps, groans, and “oh my Gods” of the film’s faux documentarians and members of the live audience.
The whole thing leaves me spooked. My friend Karen and I walk silently out of the theatre. “That guy really looked like Daniel,” I finally say. “Yeah,” Karen replies in a solemn, I-wish-it-wasn’t-true tone, “I know.” Obviously, the suicide packed a mean punch that I, and most of the audience, had not anticipated—though foreshadowing details are in fact littered throughout the film, as I discovered when, out of curiosity, I rented the video recently. Unlike life, you can view a movie again, fast-forwarding and rewinding to your heart’s content, seeing what you may have missed, confirming or discarding your suspicions.
Dick makes at least two references to Kurt Cobain in the course of the film. One song on the soundtrack is called “Suicide Club,” another, “Something Is Gonna Die Tonight.” During an over-the-top group acid trip at the secluded country house of a burnt-out punk icon named Bucky Haight, there’s a half-second flash of Dick putting a gun to his head, and during the final performance, he makes the gesture again. Hard to imagine that the final outcome of all of this would be such a surprise, but suicide can really be like that. Besides, the world of punk—and a good portion of modern and postmodern art, music, and literature aimed at and emanating from people under thirty—is utterly ruled by the poses and attitudes of despair. It’s part of the general cultural blur, the barely noticed psychological wallpaper that adorns youthful waking lives en masse. That it might be more than a pose in some cases is cause for denial.
Yet it is unrealistic to imagine that out of all that stylized anger and aggression, there would not be casualties, and there are. We may want to hope that everyone can leave their fuck-the-world attitudes behind at the bar or concert venue and go off to happy, harmonious lives, wholesome hobbies, unperturbed relationships, purposeful work. We don’t particularly want to face the fact that many come to these gatherings to let off steam precisely because they do not lead such lives. Young people are naturally drawn to music that channels the tempestuous emotions they feel, or conversely, jump-starts them out of their protective numbness, and ideally transcends it. But in much of punk, and other newer incarnations of alternative music, it can amount to just revelling in those potentially dangerous emotions.
In any form of popular expression, there’s a fine line between art that springs legitimately from genuine experience and mercenary exploitation of a theme already well mined. With alternative music, there are the original artists who rage and lash out at the status quo because they understand instinctively its corrupting, or merely compromising, dynamics, and are smart and sensitive enough to at least try to reject them. Then there are the imitators who swoop in and pump out their commercially driven facsimiles, maybe so far removed from an authentic sense of themselves that they hardly perceive their own fraudulence. In today’s popular music business, some would say there is no line left, that the entire enterprise is driven exclusively by the goals of profit and mass popularity, and that any band that truly stood by its rebellious stance toward mainstream cultural dissemination would never “sell out” to a major record label in the first place. This attitude may be a little too pure by half; it’s not necessarily evil to want lots of people to hear your music. I don’t believe that Kurt Cobain, to cite the most obvious example, started out consciously manufacturing his pain, though he certainly ended up in heroin-and-celebrity-generated hell. Whether the despair is real or imagined, it’s messy stuff. If I were an aspiring rock musician, I would think twice before noodling around with suicidal themes just because it’s cool.
Yet the impulse to play with despair, to nurture and revere the depressive stance, is so powerful today. Since Daniel’s death, I find this attitude everywhere. “Hey, Jones, dead poet! Cool,” exclaimed the plumpish, very young man as he picked up a copy of This Magazine, the one containing Lynn Crosbie’s article about Daniel (“Last Words,” January 1996), at a booth where I was volunteering to sell magazines at the Word on the Street book festival. I looked at him as he eagerly flipped the pages. I wanted to take his puppy-fat, peach-fuzz-goateed chin firmly in my hand, turn his face toward me, and say, “No, honey child, dead poet notcool. Not cool at all Daniel Jones, live poet way more cool! And don’t ever forget it! Don’t ever think suicide is cool, don’t ever imagine you need to be depressed, drunk, or doped up to write well. DON’T!” But the young man toddled off into the milling Queen Street crowd hand-in-hand with his girlfriend before I had a chance to make any grand, crotchety statement.
Where did this notion that self-destruction is cool originate? It goes a long way back: The contemporary incarnation, from the “heroin chic” of high-fashion photo spreads to the proliferation of rock bands that glory in depression and suicide, has its roots in the Romantic era. Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther sparked a notorious spate of suicides among the poetically disposed youth of Europe in the early nineteenth century; the widely observed phenomenon of similar “contagion”-style suicides in the generations since has thus been labelled “the Werther effect.”
With the end of official Romanticism in the early twentieth century, argues Alfred Alvarez in The Savage God, “suicide did not disappear from the arts; instead it became a part of their fabric…. because it threw a sharp, narrow, intensely dramatic light on life at its extreme moments, suicide became the preoccupation of certain kinds of post-Romantic writers, like Dostoevsky, who were the forerunners of twentieth-century art.” Fast forward to the post-, or semi-, or techno-literate end of the century, and find that despair-fuelled rock musicians and other assorted film or TV celebrities have supplanted writers as the Werthers of our age. Their deaths by suicide or other forms of violence can spark mass response. After the suicide of Kurt Cobain in 1994, public mourning among young people reached fever pitch, and a handful of youth suicides was documented throughout North America. However, it is interesting to note that the youth suicide rate in the Seattle area where he lived and died never skyrocketed as feared. Experts who studied the statistics have since speculated that the large-scale mobilization of crisis teams in high schools, and suicide-prevention measures such as distress phone lines exclusively for young people, may actually have had the intended preventative effect.
In Japan, the 1998 suicide of popular rock singer Hideto “Hide” Matsumoto caused public paroxysms of teen grief. Fearful parents accompanied their sons and daughters to mass public services held at a Buddhist temple, where one girl did attempt suicide. Several others had already been successful. At least one teenager employed the same method of hanging with a towel that Matsumoto had used. It was a chilling replay of the spate of suicides in that country that followed the 1992 death of singer Yutaka Ozaki.
In North America, Kurt Cobain’s suicide may not have led to the contagion effect parents and public health officials feared, but I’ve interviewed two sets of Canadian parents whose teenage sons killed themselves with a clear nod to Cobain, both in method used and as inspiration. It’s hard to argue that rock music is innocuous when an anguished parent shows you a dead son’s diary in which Nirvana song lyrics are prominently and frequently quoted. Another told me that the scene he found in his son’s bedroom after his suicide seemed eerily set up to mimic the rock star’s by-then-famous death by shotgun blast to the head.
Having said this, I don’t believe censoring or regulating rock music will solve the problem of teen suicide. That would, I’m afraid, only be shooting the messenger. Parental clucking likely drives already troubled teenagers further into their rebellious obsessions—if it bugs Mom and Dad, so much the better. The vast majority of teenagers do not, after all, kill themselves with a steady diet of this stuff, though like junk food, it might not be entirely good for them. With all suicides, you have to look at what else was going on in a person’s life, sometimes deep beneath the ordinarily exposed surface, rather than blaming any one thing, including depressing or violent song lyrics.
Still, the performers themselves are often all too conscious of their dark personas, savouring and courting the dangerous side of life, vividly playing out the fantasies of their youthful fans, most of whom are at a stage in their lives when they are prone to wild projection and identification with “mentors.” Jim Morrison of The Doors is the archetypal example of the brooding rock prince, whose doom-laden songs and intensely erotic sensibility endure in their power to seduce young people seeking music that reflects and amplifies their angst. Yet the early artistry of his songs eventually gave way to turgid wallowing as alcoholism changed him from an original creative talent into a fat, obnoxious drunk, masturbating on stage, wastefully dead at age twenty-seven. Morrison’s grave in a Paris cemetery remains a busy centre of pilgrimage traffic from a steady stream of youthful idolators—so much so that the graveyard’s managers want to put a stop to the disruption by having Morrison’s body moved elsewhere.
Deborah Curtis, wife of Ian Curtis, the depressive young lead singer of the Manchester rock band Joy Division who killed himself in 1980, observes grimly in her 1995 biography, Touching from a Distance: “All he needed was the excuse to follow his idols into immortality and being part of Joy Division gave him the tools to build the heart-rending reasons.” On the day of his death, his wife says she awoke to the sound of—what else?—The Doors’ anthem to suicidal climax, “The End,” echoing loudly in her head.
At twenty-three, the obsessive and self-absorbed Curtis had a fast-growing following and mystique, sparked by a powerful stage presence and a voice hailed by U2’s lead singer Bono as “holy.” He was also an epileptic whose occasional violent, spasmodic fits in performance were taken by enthusiastic audiences as part of the act, though according to his wife, they were not calculated, and left Curtis himself feeling humiliated, exhausted, and physically and emotionally battered. He hanged himself only days before a scheduled first tour of North America. His wife speculates that he feared the stress of impending global fame and success. She also learned after his death that epileptics have a suicide rate five times higher than that of the average population.
Just weeks before his suicide in November 1997, INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence participated in the filming of the movie Limp. In it, he played a character who counsels a young rock musician to kill himself in order to secure his place in rock history. His character refers admiringly to Cobain’s death: “It was brilliant on his part. Otherwise, he would have just been another flavour of the day.” It’s unclear whether Hutchence himself believed that his own suicide would elevate him forever to an immortality that might elude him if he instead died quietly in his bed of a common disease at the age of eighty-six. But the film’s character does express a sentiment that seems somehow hard-wired into rock ‘n’ roll.
For his part, Hutchence would appear to have been suffering a classic case of depression at the time of his suicide. The media speculated immediately after his death by hanging in an Australian hotel room that he had been playing some kind of kinky sex game. This despite the fact that the singer was in many ways a textbook case of high suicide risk: a depressed white male in his thirties taking Prozac and recovering from drug addiction, who had expressed suicidal feelings to friends in the weeks before, was isolated from his family at the time, and in the middle of an ugly separation and custody battle with his girlfriend’s ex-husband, former feed-the-world guru, Bob Geldof. Yeah, let’s go with the sex-game theory.
Women have also died on the altar of beautiful rock ‘n’ roll doom, via the familiar route of suicide or more ambiguous drug overdoses, carrying on a disturbing legacy of what it means to be a female artist. Kristen Pfaff, a guitarist with Courtney Love’s band, Hole, is one of the latest heroin heroines now resting in peace. The centuries-old persona of the depressive, anorexic artist/poetess, sacrificing happiness and convention for the lonely pursuit of her gloomy art, reached full flowering in our own century, argues Germaine Greer persuasively. In her 1995 study of the dark side of female poetry-making, Slip-Shod Sibyls, she suggests that “the versifying of agony and rage” that characterizes the work of many female poets has limitations, both artistically and spiritually, yet has been misguidedly celebrated and encouraged. Women such as Marina Tsvetaeva, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, all of whom eventually killed themselves, were gifted poets who gained fame and praise primarily through confessional writing out of their depressions, in the thrall of a distorted ideology that led them to spend their creative lives fuelling their own pathologies. With these poets held up as role models for generations of young women, their legacies nurture the notion that to be poetic, you must suffer, that a poem is of no real worth unless it comes soaked in the blood of your own wounds, preferably self-inflicted.
All this, Greer writes, was encouraged well into the twentieth century by a mostly male literary establishment that fostered a demeaning feminine aesthetic, a “rhetoric of petulance” that “locks women into their victim status.” Citing a 1921 anthology of women’s verse that included more poems by the late Amy Levy than by anyone else, Greer observes, “there can be no doubt in such a case that Levy’s suicide at twenty-eight added glamour and gravitas to her reputation, for hers is not by any criterion the most impressive verse written by this group of women.” Greer notes with passion that “no text, however incandescent, is worth a single human life.”
Killing yourself was at one time cool on slightly different grounds than securing rock ‘n’ roll legend status or greater space in poetry anthologies. The roots of suicidality in art and life go deep, and are in fact as old and as universal as humanity itself. Alvarez explains how the early Christian church established suicide, or “self-murder,” as a sin and, along with the state, nurtured the taboo surrounding it. The concept of immortality is a powerful one; the early church fathers were trying to discourage the alarming numbers of people who were killing themselves in hopes of becoming saints and martyrs to the glory of Christ—though perhaps, one wonders, also to escape a life of various torments, including the backbreaking labour of building cathedrals or bringing in the sheaves ad infinitum. Thus, the successful suicide became a felon, and his or her relatives were cruelly penalized.
From the zealots of Masada to the kamikaze pilots of Japan; from today’s Arab suicide bombers to Jonestown’s spiked—Kool-Aid drinkers and the Heaven’s Gate cult members following the Hale Bopp comet to a better life aboard a spaceship—the inspirations and rationales may change, but the paradoxical human impulse to immortalize oneself through an early and exalted death has probably always been with us. The history of human culture is littered with ample evidence of a collective self-destructive instinct, a drive that impels us to enact our own deaths for various glorified reasons, or at least, to fantasize about doing so. As a species, we also groom certain individuals for self-sacrifice to quell the group’s disturbing urges. Anyone writing about human psychology from Freud and Jung on has explored one or another aspect of this disturbing truth.
The connection between such aggressive urges and suicidality, from ancient times to the present, cannot be overlooked. Many well-preserved, millenia-old bodies exhumed from boggy graves throughout Europe appear to have met their deaths in some kind of ritual sacrifice. Some are young, strong specimens of humanity, wearing the garb of royalty or at least nobility, and surrounded by valuable, symbolic objects; they bear no marks of having struggled in their final moments. They have lain peacefully for centuries, on grounds that appear to have borne sacred significance for the tribal groups to which they belonged. In their resplendent clothing and jewellery, they keep the secrets of their lives and deaths, but scientists speculate that at least some of these people died their apparently ritualized deaths willingly. Perhaps if they lived today, they’d pursue careers as poets or rock musicians.
It is a powerful force, this curious and largely unconscious desire to live and die nobly and famously, and to be remembered into eternity, one that may well be the collective emotional backdrop against which many an individual suicidal drama or fantasy is played out. In our age, the psychological mechanisms at work in these fantasies may also have to do with imagining how one will look to the living—heroic, forever young—après one’s own self-styled entry into rigor mortis, rather than with any belief in a halcyon afterlife.
In this, concepts of young death and public mourning are linked in a fascinating way. And it doesn’t apply only to suicides. How else to explain the orgasmic global grief after the accidental death of Princess Diana? Extraordinarily, it was reported that the numbers of people seeking psychological counselling in Britain dropped dramatically—a whopping 50 percent—in the months after her death. Pundits theorized that the shocking event triggered a deep-seated need to grieve, that people were perhaps grieving other losses as they grieved for Diana, her death triggering their own long-overdue catharses, especially in England itself, well known for its stiff upper lips.
In a culture of celebrity worship-cum-narcissistic projection, there could be no more perfect martyr than the sometimes-suicidal Diana, no more perfect life from which to fashion a compellingly timeless, entirely modern, myth. Her death exposed how closely millions of people connected themselves to the rising and falling fortunes of the lovely princess with a heart of gold, a doomed love life, and a fabulous wardrobe. People who grumbled about the comparative lack of visceral mass grief expressed after the death of Mother Teresa missed the point. Fantasies are not politically correct; few harbour a secret longing to be, or sleep with, an aged nun, however towering her achievements and virtues. With Diana’s death personally felt by a planetful of strangers, the requisite conspiracy-theory echo effect will reverberate for years to come, a standard coda to these kinds of dramas, similar to the rumours and suspicions now surrounding Kurt Cobain’s death. The People’s Princess joined the pantheon of modern-day human sacrifices; in this sense, she, and we in our bloodlust for beautiful losers, are perhaps more connected to those mysterious, yet beauteously preserved bog people than we might care to admit.
And so the famous, in their untimely deaths, provide some unconscious gratification to us. Even as the unfamous fans vicariously grieve, they plug into a kind of electrical surge of feeling that makes them feel more alive, at one somehow with large and powerful forces beyond anyone’s control. Perhaps the Jim Morrisons, Ian Curtises, Kurt Cobains, and Michael Hutchences of the world hook themselves and their personal confusions, their depressions, and addictions, to this same charge, creating a gateway through which to usher in their own suicides. The individual circumstances of each death may be unique, bearing all the hallmarks of contemporary culture—guns, street drugs, antidepressants, familial chaos, dissolute celebrity lifestyles—but the impulse comes from a primal place in the human psyche.
I can’t say to what degree these kinds of unconscious motives operated in Daniel’s case. He was familiar with the culture of suicide, read about it as extensively as he did other subjects, might even be said to have possessed an aesthete’s refined appreciation of it and the nihilistic, existentialist ideas that have somehow justified it in this century. I maintain my view that these “philosophies” and “principles” are no useful guides to a depressed individual, that they merely mask underlying savage, self-destructive impulses that cannot be successfully explained or rationalized intellectually. This of course hasn’t stopped a great many writers from attempting to do so, in the wake of wars, holocausts, pogroms, and other social cataclysms that traumatize, depress, and have historically given rise to such ideas.
Is it really any wonder then, that when it comes to suicide, we like to watch? Hard Core Logo wasn’t the first or the last depiction of suicide in films, tv, theatre, books, and elsewhere to catch me off guard. Only a few weeks after Daniel’s death, a well-meaning friend invited me to see a play with her, obviously hoping to take my mind off my troubles for a few hours. Not long into the performance we realized that suicide was a major subplot. I think it upset my friend more than it did me. “Are you okay?” she whispered, holding my arm as though she would lift me from my seat and briskly escort me out of the theatre if I answered no. It was almost funny. I assured her that I was fine. I think I was still too numb to care what the play had to say about anything, let alone suicide.
Later, in April, visiting my sister in London, England, she set me up one evening with a plate of comfort food in front of the TV, to watch an episode of the BBC police drama Inside the Line. Midway through the episode, a young policewoman leaps to her death from a Thames River tour boat; I laughed to see my sister practically lunge across the living room for the off button. In the 1990s, there’s clearly little point trying to protect a mourner from reminders of suicide and its awful prevalence.
References to suicide have become pervasive, casual, even required. They weren’t always so blatant or graphic. One of the earliest and most famous films featuring suicide was the sentimental It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), where the suicide in question does not actually take place in the end, life is soundly affirmed, and everyone lives happily ever after, sure in the knowledge that in a pinch, some guardian angel will surely come to your rescue. In the early 1960s, a more sophisticated take on the subject can be found in The Children’s Hour, featuring not just the taboo of suicide, but also lesbianism, though it’s all so tastefully and understatedly handled, and the climactic glimpse of Shirley MacLaine’s hanging body so shadowy, that you could almost miss what is actually going on. Perhaps some filmgoers at the time preferred to remain confused. In the early seventies, Woody Allen did a humorous turn on the subject in Play it Again, Sam, in which he tries to pick up a morose young woman at an art gallery by engaging her in conversation about the painting they are looking at. She gives him a flat-voiced and depressing interpretive monologue, after which he asks what she’s doing that evening. “Committing suicide,” she replies lugubriously, as she slinks away.
In the late 1970s, critics praised the sober maturity of the suicidal theme at the heart of Ordinary People. There have been numerous films since that deal with the subject with varying degrees of directness; Todd Solondz’s darkly satiric film, Happiness, is the first I’ve seen to feature a Final Exit-style suicide. But in most such films of the 1990s, you can forget happy endings, subtle or ambiguous shadings, or a purely light touch. I had to wonder at how far we have come in our entertainment demands while watching the 1997 film The Devil’s Advocate, in which Keanu Reaves, to avoid losing his soul to Satan, blows out his brains with a gun, in a giant close-up. The film is as mainstream as they come, meaning that thousands upon thousands of people were watching, as I was, this almost pornographic, slow-motion display of blood and brains spraying out from the screen-size head of Reeves as the suicide-in-progress. The scene came on the heels of one almost as graphic, in which the wife of the character played by Reeves breaks the glass on the door of her mental-ward room—Al Pacino, a.k.a. Satan, has placed her in an impossible bind too—and violently gouges her wrists, with successful results on the death front.
The more recent thriller Snake Eyes also culminates in a cinematic shotgun blast to the head for actor Gary Sinise; Character, the Dutch production that won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film of 1997, follows the life and times of a diabolical bailiff who takes self-loathing to operatic extremes, courting destruction at every turn, until finally he stands in dramatic close-up at the precipice of an old warehouse shaft, plunges a knife deep into his belly, and free-falls into oblivion.
No, these days it’s not a wonderful life. Have we become so psychologically numbed that we must witness such jumped-up brutality to feel we’ve gotten our money’s worth? Why ask such a naive question? Yet as a suicide survivor, you start noticing when you find yourself culturally surrounded by suicide, particularly in the early stages of grieving, when any such passing reference seems like a jolt. Survivors report having unwelcome feelings triggered even by innocent visits to the grocery store, where they have been confronted with shelves of various grades of “suicidal” hot sauce.
The problem of navigating the outside world in the middle of your grief, without stepping on any landmines that could rip uninvited into your private emotional life, is more pressing and real than it has ever been, precisely because of the inescapability of these dime-a-dozen references. For better or worse, individuals in contemporary society have a relationship with the mass media; we bond and respond according to our own personality and prevailing mood. This multiple-personality Media can be a breezy, entertaining buddy, a concerned and thorough teacher bent on enlightening and informing, a shameless manipulator, a brainless twit, an overbearing nuisance, and worse, an insensitive, torturing bully.
Grief counsellors are often called upon to calm rattled survivors’ fears that starting with the deaths of their own loved ones, suicide has become a strange and sweeping epidemic. While annual suicide figures throughout the world show a steady rise since the 1950s, that is partly accounted for by the fact that these deaths are more openly recorded now. It’s also true that since the seventies, the overall yearly increases in suicides have not been significant in North America. Several years in this decade show numbers that are actually lower than some years of the 1970s. In 1994, the year Kurt Cobain died, there were 243 suicides in metropolitan Toronto, fewer than the 271 of the previous year, and the 250 of the following one. Contrary to media hype, there was no teen epidemic in Toronto, any more than there was in Seattle—only four of the 243 total were people under the age of nineteen. While statistics tend to vary within age groups and regionally, the overall rates are remarkably steady.
Based on my own experience, I’m tempted to counsel anyone who is going through the early stages of such grief to avoid films, newspapers, and TV altogether. I was stunned to find my own private mourning suddenly overlaid by mass public shock at the violent, self-inflicted death of Kurt Cobain. I winced and looked away from large close-ups of his haunted face staring from the covers of magazines everywhere. I could barely listen to news clips of Courtney Love’s raw, excoriating public reading of his suicide note; I’d already read one too many, and didn’t think I had anything more to learn, or any more I could take, of the genre. (Now, I hear it is possible to buy T-shirts with Cobain’s suicide note printed on them.)
In the ensuing weeks, laments for the rock star and sober media analysis on the subject of suicide burgeoned. Cobain’s howl-of-angst music, played obsessively on radio and TV, took on a new, more chilling spin. I tried to read some of the articles, but found little to enlighten me about this thing called suicide that now ruled my own life. Did we really need yet another trotting out of the usual facts about depression rates and Prozac? Why such overreporting about high-profile cases such as those of Cobain and White House aide Vince Foster, yet virtually none about the thousands of other people who attempt or complete suicide in any given year? While teen suicide is shocking, the media obsession with it tends to obscure the fact that most suicides are still committed by much older adults. Where are their stories? Where is any reflection of the survivor’s experience? The prevention movement? An in-depth look at why men kill themselves with such comparative frequency? Analysis, rather than just-the-facts-Ma’am reporting, of the disturbing trend in domestic murder-suicides? Some serious questions about the prevalence of guns in American culture? Not anywhere I looked, in those early sensationalized flare-ups of herd reporting that immediately followed Cobain’s death, and just as abruptly dropped from notice when the event was, a few weeks later, yesterday’s news.
Turn on the TV, and find a commercial for an allergy medication in which allergens attend a psychotherapy support group and tearfully confess they want to kill themselves now that effective symptom relief for allergy sufferers has removed their purpose in life. In another prime-time commercial aired in 1998, a man threatened to jump from a high building because his breakfasts were unbearably boring; police officers talked him down with promises of a new kind of waffle. Though suicidal hot sauce may be an acceptable and standard product on grocery-store shelves, we do not similarly have among our consumer options heart-attack ice cream, or cancer smoked meat. We’d probably find that tasteless, yet we don’t hesitate to trivialize suicide. Although no longer an entirely taboo subject, we fear it enough to reflexively want to make it and the despair that drives people to it somehow nonsensical.
Members of one on-line support group for suicide survivors that I joined for a time spent a good deal of their time sharing these kinds of experiences, and advising others of films and television programs to watch or avoid. It was a passionate, urgent exercise in protective networking that would not have been possible, or perhaps even necessary, on this global scale as recently as ten years ago. One man announced that he was writing a letter of protest to late-night talk show host Jay Leno, after the comedian made what the man thought was a tasteless joke about suicide. A woman counselled others who might be sensitive to avoid the film The Game, which contains a scene in which a man jumps to his death from the window of his mansion; the scene re-appears as a leitmotif throughout the film.
Of course, sometimes these surprise appearances of suicide come with genuine intelligence and wit. The surreal French film Delicatessen (1991) contains a shockingly funny subplot featuring a beleaguered and hysterical woman who fails to do herself in, foiled repeatedly as she tries ever more ludicrously elaborate means. The humour may be bleak, yet the irreverence here says something too true about the human condition—and in a highly stylized film about cannibalism, the suicidal antics seem downright tame.
The plot of one episode of CBC’s internationally acclaimed satirical program, The Newsroom, revolved around the threat of a failed screenwriter to kill himself on camera. The news programmers are of course beside themselves with glee, and so intent on getting the great clip that they are visibly distressed when the man begins to reconsider his plan. With thoughts ever on the ratings, scumball news director George sets assiduously to the task of rekindling the man’s despair. A similar sly comment even appears in the movie Spice World. When the Spice Girls’ pompous-ass manager pulls out a noose and threatens to hang himself after the group refuses to perform a scheduled concert, the dim-witted documentarian who stumbles after them throughout the film noses in with his camera. When the manager recants his threat, the man is openly morose. “There goes the best thing in the film,” is his nakedly mercenary comment on the matter. Even kids, and the parents who accompanied them to a fluffy summer film, were getting their dose of suicide-inspired cynicism.
It’s not that exploring suicide, even facetiously, is inherently wrong or dangerous. Studies on the links between fictional, filmed, or televised treatments of suicide and its actual incidence have yielded contradictory results. Suicide experts have found some relationship between teenage suicide and televised portrayals, but some are inclined to hedge, and to downplay the possibility that the Werther effect might successfully transmit itself through mass media. “To the extent that fictional presentations of suicide may serve as stimuli for imitative behavior, the effect appears to depend on a complex interaction among characteristics of the stimulus, the observer of that stimulus, and conditions of time and geography.” This is the cautious conclusion of Alan L. Berman, an American psychologist and leading suicide expert. I believe he means that someone would have to be leaning strongly toward suicide anyway to be triggered into action by something like a TV program. It may be that film-makers and television programmers don’t necessarily have to worry about being held responsible for real suicides, should they focus on the subject in fictional form. Still, its use in plots does seem gratuitous at times, as though to have your film, novel, or television program taken seriously, at one with the Zeitgeist of the moment, you had better throw in a suicide.
Some artists do seriously explore or touch on the subject. Our death instincts, in the form of self-destructive impulses, are real, and often denied in our day-to-day lives, sometimes astonishingly so, given how prevalent random violence has become. So why not explore these impulses and the circumstances that surround them, this dangerous real terrain? Several recent films, including The Hanging Garden, Girls’ Town, Once Were Warriors, and even the popular comedy The Full Monty, don’t insult the humanity of either their characters or the audience. For actors, this trend perhaps means that just as they must decide whether or not to do nude scenes, they’ll also now have to decide whether to add suicide scenes to their repertoires. Many have already done so—as well as the gunshots to the head of Hugh Dillon in Hard Core Logo, Gary Sinise in Snake Eyes, and Keanu Reeves in The Devil’s Advocate, suicides have recently been portrayed on film by Kathy Bates (Primary Colors), Vanessa Redgrave (Deep Impact), William H. Macy (Boogie Nights), and Courtney Love (The People vs. Larry Flynt), to name just a few. I did wonder particularly how the widow Love felt as she played the character of a junkie dying of AIDS who drowns herself in a large bathtub.
I’ve noted my own feelings and reactions too, for as with Hard Core Logo, I found as I watched other films that I rarely saw it coming, and yet couldn’t believe that was the case, once it had happened. My emotional response varied greatly. In a thriller like The Game, you don’t exactly bond with the characters, and so when a minor one plunges to his death, it’s hardly heartbreaking—unless, of course, as was pointed out at the suicide survivor on-line support group, you’ve recently lost a loved one in a similar manner. But then I watched the film Carrington, based on the real life story of Dora Carrington, a Bloomsbury denizen who had a long and curiously intense relationship with the homosexual Lytton Strachey. I felt as though the wind had been kicked out of me when the scene came in which the painter Carrington, played by Emma Thompson, calmly prepares to shoot herself. My heart sank as she briskly gathered up her brushes, paints, and palette and threw them into a garbage can in her studio, moments before she matter-of-factly positions the long-barrelled gun against her chest and, still standing, pulls the trigger.
Something about this image of the artist simply giving up, saying, “To hell with it, I can’t do it anymore,” resonated in a terrible way for me. How difficult it seems for so many of the gifted to find the conditions in which they can make their art without destroying themselves. How many great creations in images, music, and words have been lost to the world through suicide? Naturally, I was thinking of Daniel, and all of his lost words.
More than anything, beyond the particular, personal ways I have come to view Daniel’s suicide, I have been perplexed as I contemplated all the stories about suicide, in a riot of forms, that have sped past me on the hectic currents of popular culture over the past five years. Why is it, I have wanted to know, that while we seem immersed in images of suicide and attitudes of despair, we are stunned, disbelieving, at a complete loss to understand what happened when a real suicide is forced upon us? Something just didn’t add up, as I regarded my own, and all of our collective, psychological responses.