Why is euthanasia regarded better than natural death?
Undoubtedly, one of the most essential and appealing nuances of an artist’s style is his approach to life. What does he believe in? Does he believe in life expressed through song, in people, and in strangers’ benevolence, like Blanche from Tennessee Williams’s stage play, “A Streetcar Named Desire?” Is life sorrowful, beautiful, fairytale-like or miraculous? Is life worth living, or is it not? This approach, somehow and somewhere, deciphers itself; we enter his world. If we manage, the deeply intimate act occurs between us.
The main matter does not result with one’s approach to life; an artist’s attitude to life and death may console the majority of people. As much as style is necessary, this perspective holds the same significance.
For instance, in the films of Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, life remains tender regardless of its hardships; it embraces the protagonist with all its beauty, never letting them go—neither in their pain nor in their joy. Therefore, he is always the protagonist of a fairytale. Everything that happens around him exists just for his benefit. Birds tweet for him, misfortunes pursue him, and cupid’s arrow wounds only his heart…
The solution of vibrant colour scheme which critics frequently interpret as pop art, even labeling him the “Warhol of cinema”, emerges from fairytale framing in my opinion. In the film the external world, the social and political connections in which the protagonist is embedded, seem to be veiled by colour. Protagonist’s spiritual and psychological inner world is foregrounded. Colour is the veil which protects us from deviation and draws our attention solely to the core of story and the protagonist. As in fairytale books, life in films painted with vibrant hues is enriched by unexpected twists. This idea simply doesn’t cross our minds “Wait a minute— How much truth do these happenings hold?” The most of central plots take their origins from real life.
If life is portrayed as a fairytale, finally if three crimson apples fall from the sky, but how is death characterized?
Two of Almodovar’s recent films explore this theme – “Pain and Glory” and “The Room Next Door”. Critics have undoubtedly detected a tone of farewell in the title of director’s book, “Last Dream”, published last year. This book features twelve artistic and autobiographical stories based not on recent notes, but on the director’s archives from the 1970s. “The Room Next Door” was filmed on the basis of motifs from the American author Sigrid Nunez’s novel “What Are You Going Through” but not on an original script by Almodovar (though he has chosen this story himself). Furthermore, the story is in English but not in Spanish, as it takes place in the US.
The film’s protagonist, the writer Ingrid, is introduced to us in the opening scene at a book signing event. According to her own statement, Ingrid (played by Juliana Moore) has written her book to perceive death better. Therefore, she cannot accept the death – the truth that all human beings must face mortality. At her book presentation, Ingrid learns that her old friend, Martha (Tilda Swinton) not met in a long time, is suffering from a serious disease. She decides to visit her friend. Martha, as a hopelessly patient, already receives experimental treatments. While working as a war correspondent, she witnessed many deaths and came to face to face with mortality.
However, the recent situation is quite different. Now, she fights with her disease and has reached a conclusion that before the disease claims her life, she will commit suicide to outpace the disease and to win over it in her own way. For this reason, she asks Ingrid for help. It is acknowledged that euthanasia in the US is legally forbidden. Martha buys a drug that could terminate her life through virtual black market and requests Ingrid to stay with her at home during her latest days. Ingrid should live only in the room next door and Martha can feel comforted simply by knowing Ingrid is nearby. But Ingrid will not know when Martha takes medication.
Thus, death is always in the room next door. We live the same experience with her. How could not we ever acknowledge its existence? To my mind, the protagonist is Ingrid. She lives in proximity to death and grasps the impossibility of its comprehension. It can only be accepted.
The aestheticization of death in daily life and the performing arts serves to come to terms with this dreadful reality. Religion, culture and fine arts have made considerable contributions in this context. For contemporary art, this is a special subject to discuss openly. For instance, there is the art project titled “The Death Room”, which was authored by the German artist Gregor Schneider, sparked significant controversy and appears to remain unrealized. Schneider intended to demonstrate the act of dying and the deceased person in specially constructed room within an artistic context. The aestheticization of death implies not only apparent beauty but also meaning. Upon deeper contemplation, all these attempts mean as a refusal to accept death, as eternal archaic illusion of somehow triumphing over mortality. Grasping the immortality of art is deemed for this intention. As desire to overcome death by reanimating memory, the central theme of the Polish theatre director, Tadeusz Kantor’s “The Dead Class”, was to revive memories relating with acquaintances perished in the war. He conducts the memories which were composed as an orchestra conductor, moving among them.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLwlBsXlqtc&t=1310s). There are a lot of samples.
Alongside the themes like the comprehension and acceptance of the death in the film “The Room Next Door”, individuality, loyalty, friendship, empathy and respect are important as well. Ingrid tries to understand Martha, aspires to do something wholeheartedly for her.
Martha rents a home in the forest. Martha’s final days are set in landscapes abounding with sunlight and greenery, rooms in ambient light, reproduction of American painter Edward Hopper’s artwork, and undoubtedly, an atmosphere with her friend Ingrid. Martha’s decision is the manifestation of self-respect. Pains, amnesia, and afflictions imposed by disease and worsened gradually threaten her, and she responds only by protecting her, her selfhood, integrity as an individual to the greatest extent. For this reason, she must precede the disease and not allow the disease to take anything away or to deprive from her, first and foremost, the attitude to herself and life. Martha adopts death as a salvation, a means of escape. Herewith, the director seemingly whispers to us how this choice is the great happiness. Event tremendous choice like euthanasia is the happiness entitled to humanity. Life is beautiful for the abundance of choices. Isn’t it the situation that Manuela, a mother who lost her son in an accident, has bound herself anew to life in the film “In All About My Mother”, or Vicente’s gender reassignment to his will served to his life existence in the film “The Skin I Live In”, or love and communication brought Alicia back from the brink of coma in the film “Talk To Him”.
In All About My Mother, Uma cites from Blanche, A Streetcar Named Desire. More precisely, this is not a citation. Uma thinks exactly like Blanche: “I believe in strangers’ benevolence”. She is characterized by the people who believe in strangers’ benevolence. “A Stranger” in the film directed by Pedro Almodovar is life: This point of view asserts that life is something you trust.
Martha makes a pact with Ingrid. Whenever the door is shut, it means that Martha has taken medicine. But one day, when the door is shut, Ingrid overwhelmed by terror and grief observes that Martha is safe and sound. Martha explains that the door was simply shut by the wind.
Finally, one day Martha’s rehearsals for death reach the end of her road. Like applying makeup, she adorns her lips with a scarlet shade. Dressing her most ostentatious coloured costume, she lies down on a wooden bench and dies – portraying in the figures in a Hopper artwork. Certainly, I do not intend to associate this theatricality with the matter of aestheticizating the before-mentioned death because we directly or indirectly face with theatricality in Almodovar’s cinema.
Theatricality
The protagonists in the films “Talk To Him” and “All About My Mother” watch a spectacle at the theatre. In the first film, the spectacle was “Café Müller” staged byPina Bausch that has gained international acclaim. The selection of Pina Bausch’s party scene among the writhing bodies for love and happiness serves as an epigraph. Pina dances in a white shirt, like lonely spirit. This scene foreshows for the viewer the characters’ spiritual and psychological balance. But it is also a living memory”.
In the film “All About My Mother”, having lost her son, Manuela re-watches the spectacle which she watched together with her son. It is like a reliving of the same moment: all remains as before, the same actors in the same costumes, standing at the same place and saying the same words. She sits precisely in the same place where she sat with her son. This scene feels like revisiting a moment…
I don’t assert that these episodes incorporate theatrical stylizations into the films because Almodovar’s films are enriched with citations, allusions and references from films, books, theatre plays and paintings. These only function as master class episodes in acting and theatricality within the film. Moreover, these are undoubtedly episodes selected as epigraphs to the plot and characters.
Theatricality in Almodovar’s filmography plays a role in the search of identity. Sexual identity, for instance, is much like a costume. Almodovar has the ability to undress and dress his characters. This happens in precisely the manner as it is in the theatre. Anne Ubersfeld, theatre scholar and semiotician, in her article “Reading Theatre”, comes to conclusion while exploring the reasons of pleasure taken in the theatre performance: “In our engagement with theatre, in the way we look at it and perceive it, there exists a pause, moment of stillness, a delay in rational judgment. What we contemplate cannot be semanticized:The actor’s physical boy, presence is that which halts our judgment and forbids further exploration – Not because such a pursuit for meaning is illegitimate, but because our judgment halts here—it finds no further sustenance for itself. The other person’s body is inexplicable as our own body, especially, when the physical gestures and indications fail to coincide with the calming code that typically relaxes our body and regulates its limbs and sensations: These foreign bodies move in ways unfamiliar to our accustomed acts. In addition, they are often not as they appear. In other word, they seem neither old nor young, and neither female nor male. Definitely they (simply stated, actors) attempt to show us Woman, the unexplanable essence of female body because they are not factually women – or it could be said, the abjection of aging while remaining young or the mask, make-up of eternal youth worn by the old one. However, most probably, they will not explicitly state any of these matters; The body of another person, much like our own, remains as an unanswered question…”
The structuring applied to the actor’s body also pertains to Almodovar’s protagonists representing sexual minority.
Huma, a trans woman and former prostitute known as Dimka, explains in the film All About My Mother. She lists the gender reassignment and cosmetic surgeries she has undergone, concluding with the statement: “It is obvious that becoming a genuine woman is expensive desire, no room for stinginess. When you resemble the woman in your imaginary more closely, you truly embody in the genuine woman”.
Almodovar’s characters are at the boundaries of genders. Tilda Swinton’s character, Martha, through her lifestyle, appearance, and even the suit she wears on the brink of death shows more similarity with the masculine traits. Furthermore, Almodovar’s characters permanently are on the edge. Something splits their lives and identities in two, and they walk through this boundary much like Martha lingering on death’s brink in the film “The Room Next Door”.
Martha is also a mother, although we never see her together with her daughter. The story reveals that there is a certain estrangement between them. Martha is unable to establish closematernal bond with her child. According to Almodovar, this bond is quiet necessary. Anyone in need of love remains a child within. If someone is a child, he/she needs a mother. The mother as archetypal figure exists in all Almodovar’s films. Martha leaves behind a truth about the father for her daughter. For Almodovar, the focused theme is identity. All the rest is colour. As the poet puts it: “The all is colour” (Samad Mansur).
Colour
Vibrant colours are outward signs and hallmarks of Almodovar’s films. Adjoining the aforementioned fairytale-like dimension, there is a semiotic function. Colour takes part in the film’s dramaturgy. It is able to generate visual character which is not only one character. Because the colour has a unifying quality. It can synchronize, serve as a leitmotif, and create contrast. In Almodovar’s filmography (in French language. para-cadre, in other word, “off-screen, outside the frame” is a concept denoting events occurring outside the visual boundaries of the frame, shot), the dominant red colour signifies love (“Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and “Talk to Her”), blood ties “Parallel Mother” and “Julieta”), life (“All About My Mother”) and death ( scarlet lipstick of the decent Martha in the film “The Room Next Door”).
As stated in Khagani Hass’s poem Red, the socialist revolution that the Spanish intelligentsia been enthralled at the dawn of the twentieth century is alluded to as followings:
Red is another colour of all colours.
Red is another colour of red.
Red is another colour of life.
Red is another colour of death.
Red calls – the human to life
The human to existence
The human to death
And red is which calls the tyranny to power
The bird to gunfire…
Chromatic composition (colour palette solution) within framework of semanticization and in the film’s descriptive narrative creates a sense of unpredictability in viewer’s perception. On one hand, the colour brightness and contrast beforehand convince the viewer that the plot can diverge in any direction. On other hand, beautiful, aesthetic natural spaces especially selected in Almodovar’s films, alternating with aforementioned colourfulness, prevent the viewer’s sense of reality from becoming dulled.
Aliya Dadashova