Death Becomes Us

Regarding Hollywood’s interest in the moribund (“Death Takes This Holiday,” by Terry Pristin, Nov. 21):

If people have to be told they are dying in order to begin living the lives they previously took for granted, what hope is there for those still nestled in the cocoon of health?

We might realize that at the moment of birth, we are an instant closer to death or, to lessen the terror of death, accept that the thing we fear most has already taken place at a future moment already dissolved in a timeless past.

Yet if such psychological nostrums don’t offer a palliative for oblivion, we might find solace in Bertrand Russell’s response to an Indian philosopher seeking relief from his crippling thanatophobia. Russell informed the man that his cosmic panic was the result of focusing in the wrong direction: trying to contemplate eternity after his death, rather than acknowledge the same eternity from which he had emerged, unscathed, at birth.

The secret (if there is one) is whisperingly simple: When people decide to live life, death isn’t cheated; however, mere existence is.

To see death desentimentalized and defetishized in film, I would recommend the following:

“La Jetee,” “The Green Wall,” “The Seventh Seal,” “Ikiru,” “Cries and Whispers,” “Wild Strawberries,” “Stalker,” “Providence,” “Fires on the Plain,” “Conversation Piece,” “Cleo From 5 to 7,” “The Purple Plain” and “The American Friend.”

And of course, watched closely, everything else.

STEWART LINDHLos Angeles