What would you do if you could sit down with a loved one who passed many years ago? What would you ask? What would you talk about? How would you feel?
These are the questions that ran around my head watching the film Dick Johnson is Dead.
Kirsten Johnson takes the time to do so before these regrets hit her later in life with her father. With all the signs of his age starting to wear on his memory and having to make the hard decisions that many must make as it relates to their parents and grandparents throughout the perpetiuty of life Johnson makes one further decision that not many do, she starts filming.
She not only decides to film this experience but also, in order to prepare herself, starts to stage elaborate and fantastical deaths for her father. These sequences range from being struck by a rogue air conditoner that immediately incapacitates him to falling down a set of stairs and slowly ending in a pool of his own blood. We watch on as they play out these fantasies of his dreams in filmed sequences of him in heaven where he plays music, dances with his deceased wife or finally has a pair of feet with all ten “normal” toes. The film is an ode to our wishes and best hopes for our relationships.
Most of all the film is a chance to connect again before it all goes away.
The film however, is not an end to end excercise of fantasy and joy. It still takes us into many moments of sadness. We watch on and hear the thoughts of all of the family members struggling with having to watch their father’s memories degrade with each step. We even are there with Kirsten as she starts to question what are the acceptable boundaries for what she is doing. While when the film starts her father is in a more lucid state for the most part on camera as time goes on and she contiues inventing “deaths” for him we wonder where his enjoyment and participation feels right anymore.
It’s hard not to make films like this personal.
I witnessed my grandmother suffer from Alzheimer’s. The disease that Kirsten’s mother suffered from and what we believe her father is beginning to suffer from, even though the film never has a doctor diagnose it on camera. It’s a wicked and terrible disease that even before our family are physically unable to participate in our lives in an active sense takes them away by having them start to feel lost mentally. Watching on as Kirsten discusses her mother not remembering who she was, or even her father forgetting what he did the night before is hard. You can see the difference in being forgettful and being completely lost and hurt by that loss.
The film tries its best to straddle the line that a documentary like The Act of Killing did. We watch on at all of these fantasies and farces wanting to believe in these dramatized scenarios. However, we’re quickly brought back to reality.
As the film comes towards it’s conclusion it makes a strong case for why it has struck a chord with so many fans already. We watch on in a sequence with no usual preparation for whether it is fictional or factual and must therefore have to decipher the clues we are given in each edit and each moment of despair. We sit there on our couches agast wondering what has happened and what it could’ve been. Kirsten slowly lets us know which of the two scenarios is real and we have nothing more but our heart made agape by her choices.
Like her last film I saw Camera Person this film felt like a personal story that you almost question why it was released publicly. It feels earnest and true without catering to any commercialized sense of need to entertain. It feels like it’s out there in the world if only just to make it easier for her to watch it herself (thanks to the streaming platform itself). I don’t know if I consider this better or worse than that previous film. I know I felt it nontheless.