Death and Dying

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    Forget Grotesque Sights. David Cronenberg Does Grotesque Desires.

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    “The Shrouds,” the director’s latest, underlines the central difference between his films and all the “body horror” that has come in their wake.In David Cronenberg’s newest film, “The Shrouds,” a widower named Karsh Relikh, played by Vincent Cassell, takes a woman on a blind date to his dead wife’s grave. They stop in front of her tombstone — a double plot, with empty space for Karsh to occupy in the future — and pay their respects in a very Cronenbergian way. On a screen on the headstone is a real-time image of his wife’s body, decaying in its grave, captured by the high-tech metallic “shroud” she was buried in; it is also transmitted to a smartphone app that allows Karsh to zoom and rotate the image at will. This technology allows people to remain connected to their loved ones by watching their bodies disintegrate, like a mash-up of the Buddhist corpse meditation and a mindfulness app. “I can see what’s happening to her,” Karsh says, enraptured, as his date squirms in discomfort. “I’m in the grave with her. I’m involved with her body the way I was in life, only even more.”You know what you are about to be shown: a body in some state of decay. But as the screen traces the desiccated shape of Karsh’s wife, Becca, with tender slowness, the effect is still irrationally startling. Death has rendered Becca’s elegant features down to an anonymized skull. Even so, there is someone on the screen whom Karsh recognizes and responds to at the deepest emotional level. You feel disgust, of course, but also a secondhand intimacy. What’s shocking is not the rotting body but the affection with which it is viewed, a tenderness that allows you to continue looking. You are not encountering death in the abstract, impersonal and horrific: You are seeing it anew, through the devoted gaze of the lover who has been left behind.These days there is nothing so shocking about seeing gruesome things on film. Horror movies are now mainstream, and it’s common for at least a few of the biggest releases at any given megaplex to offer some kind of grisly fright. Violence is also more common than ever on the screens of our laptops and phones, where social media catalogs accidents, bombings and dead children with eerie nonchalance. Despite all this, Cronenberg’s films remain difficult to digest. They are full of disconcerting bodily transgressions, rooted in aberrant desire. They get under the skin, repulsing even viewers accustomed to the usual Hollywood blood and gore. His last film, “Crimes of the Future,” from 2022, prompted one dissatisfied reviewer to write that it “should be renamed crimes against humanity.”Perhaps this is because of the way Cronenberg’s movies tend to relish the things that are most terrifying to the audience. Other horror films share the viewer’s repugnance, even reinforce it; only Cronenberg asks you to imagine what it would be like to be erotically transfixed by a car crash (as in “Crash”) or by tenderly performing ornamental surgeries on your partner (as in “Crimes of the Future”). His films invite you into a morality that does not yet exist, hinting at the possibility that the values and norms of your world could be supplanted someday. In a recent interview, he pointed out that we already possess the technical know-how to make something like his fictional death shrouds: “It’s an imagined technology probably nobody really wants, but I’m saying: What if somebody did want it?” Rather than dwelling in the horror of transgression, his interest is in what lies beyond — in transgression’s intimate life.Lately it feels as if movies are more Cronenbergian than ever, obsessed with triggering our fear of the body’s capacity for gruesome transformation. “The Substance,” a hit from the French director Coralie Fargeat, served up the story of an aging actress who creates a younger, sexier double of herself to stay on top of her body-obsessed industry — but suffers a rapid and freakish decrepitude when the double decides to go rogue. “Mickey 17,” a science-fiction romp from the Oscar winner Bong Joon Ho, follows a high-risk worker who is used as an experimental guinea pig, then cloned and tossed ruthlessly down a recycling chute. In each, we see bodies agonizing under the burden of a monstrous social system.‘It’s an imagined technology probably nobody really wants, but I’m saying: What if somebody did want it?’We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Interview’: Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word with Trump About His Mother

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      Unexpected, even uncanny, connections sometimes arise in this job. An interviewee might, for example, raise an idea that chimes with something I’ve long been thinking about. Or I’ll find while doing research that someone’s work illuminates a problem I’d been dealing with. Two such surprises occurred with this week’s subject, the Academy Award-winning actress Tilda Swinton. Both shaped my feeling about the ensuing conversation, though in very different ways.Listen to the Interview With Tilda SwintonThe Academy Award-winning actress discusses her lifelong quest for connection, humanity’s innate goodness and the point of being alive.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppThe first: In a book of sketches and musings by the British writer John Berger called “Bento’s Sketchbook,” one drawing has always mesmerized me. It’s of an androgynous face with almond-shaped, almost alien eyes, and it exudes a deeply human compassion. That sketch is labeled, simply, “Tilda,” and I hadn’t much thought about upon whom it was based. Until, that is, when in preparation for my interview with Swinton, I watched a documentary she co-directed about Berger. In it, she mentions “Bento’s Sketchbook” — and a lightbulb went on. I’d long admired that sketch and Swinton’s daring, shape-shifting acting — in her avant-garde films with her mentor and friend Derek Jarman, her indie collaborations with directors like Bong Joon Ho and Wes Anderson and her Hollywood triumphs like “Michael Clayton” and the “Chronicles of Narnia” trilogy — but I’d never put together that I’d been entranced by the same person, the same presence, the whole time. I couldn’t help taking that as a good omen for the interview.The second connection was harder to interpret. Readers of this column may remember that my last Q&A was with a doctor about medical aid in dying — a subject with which I’ve had recent personal experience. Swinton’s upcoming film, “The Room Next Door,” directed by the great Pedro Almodóvar and opening in select theaters on Dec. 20, is about — and I swear I didn’t know this ahead of time — a distressingly similar topic. In the movie, Swinton plays a woman named Martha, who asks her friend Ingrid, played by Julianne Moore, to support her decision to die by suicide after becoming terminally ill. I would have felt disingenuous not to be open about this coincidence with Swinton, but I also wasn’t exactly eager to explore it. She, as it turns out, felt otherwise.“The Room Next Door” is based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez, “What Are You Going Through,” which takes its title from a quote by the French philosopher Simone Weil: “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, what are you going through?” So what are you going through? I’m enjoying right now the attention to that question, and the fact that our film puts that question into the air. The idea of bearing witness, and the question of what is friendship, but even more than friendship, what is it to coexist? What is it to not look away? I think of it actually as a political film.I have questions about that, but I want to preface them by sharing what I hope is a morbidly humorous anecdote. Sounds good! More

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      Al Pacino Is Still Going Big

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      Al Pacino has been one of the world’s greatest, most influential actors for more than 50 years. He’s audacious. He’s outrageous. He’s Al Pacino, and I’m pretty sure you know what that entails.Listen to the Conversation With Al PacinoA conversation with the legendary actor about, well, everything.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppSo I’d like to talk about some aspects of him that merit fresh discussion. Did you know, for example, that he is cinema’s greatest-ever swearer? (This is fact, not opinion.) He delights in those words. He lustily chomps on them. This zest for delivering colorful language, I suspect, is a source of the criticism that he has become a scenery-chewer. Which isn’t nearly the whole picture. Fans of his layered, subtle work in “The Godfather” or “Dog Day Afternoon” need to immediately see more recent films like “The Humbling” or “The Insider” or “Manglehorn” to understand his enduring range. But also, the parts of Pacino movies where Pacino goes big are always the best parts of Pacino movies! Did anyone want him to underplay Satan in “The Devil’s Advocate”?Though he can go small and internal, Pacino’s ability to really emote is one of his singular gifts. That’s why, secretly, the best Pacino is crowd-pleasing Hollywood movie star ’90s Pacino. Given the revolutionary work he did in the ’70s, this is akin to claiming that the key work of a critically acclaimed, groundbreaking band occurred after it went pop. But ’90s Pacino is when his gargantuan skill, volcanic charisma and joyful desire to entertain all coalesced magically.“Hoo-ah!”The first time I ever consciously noticed a Pacino performance was also the first time I ever consciously saw an actor in a movie and thought, That’s good acting. It was 1990, I was only 8 years old and I’d just seen Pacino play the grotesque gangster Big Boy Caprice in “Dick Tracy.” (Don’t scoff. Pacino earned an Oscar nomination for the part.) Hidden under garish makeup and a hunchback, Pacino was kinetic and uninhibited and, most of all, believable in a way that registered to even a child. That lusty emotionality and passionate exuberance — his sense of being truly alive to each moment in his character’s life — is what Pacino brought with such distinction to his movies in that period, which was also the period when I grew from a child to a young man.Pacino’s engagement with his art was a model for how passionately — and variously — you could engage with the world. He has always been brilliant at playing cops and criminals like Big Boy. But he has also played biblical kings, cockney sociopaths, sharkish salesmen, a short-order cook and a Gucci. He’s done Mamet and Brecht and Shakespeare. (His majestic, tragic Shylock was the best theatrical performance I’ve ever seen.) He has played Phil Spector, Jimmy Hoffa, Jack Kevorkian, Joe Paterno, Roy Cohn and, on two occasions, versions of himself. He did it in the artfully self-reflexive documentary “Looking For Richard,” then in the somewhat-less-artful Adam Sandler vehicle “Jack and Jill.” Has he always been perfect? No. He strives for something riskier and more alive than perfection. Is he always perceptive, free, unmissable? God, yes. More

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      Pedro Almodóvar, Master of Mystifying Films, Wrote a Book He Can’t Classify

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      Pedro Almodóvar is widely considered Spain’s greatest living filmmaker, but he sees himself as a writer first — a “fabulist,” in his telling. His extravagant plots took twists that were hard to predict or even pin down. The tale of two men who form a bond looking over two comatose women in “Talk to Her.” The story of a plastic surgeon who operates on a captive man, changing him to a woman against his will in “The Skin I Live In.”Of his more than 20 feature films, Almodóvar wrote or co-wrote nearly all of them. He had probably spent more days at a writing desk than on a set.As it turned out, he had been writing many other things, too — short stories, diary entries, a few unclassifiable essays — nearly the entire time he was making films. The tales sat in several mysterious blue folders, collected by his assistant Lola García over the course of the director’s many moves to different apartments in Madrid. In 2022, at the urging of the Spanish literary editor Jaume Bonfill, Almodóvar had a look at what had been saved over the years.“It was like seeing a dimension of Pedro that I didn’t know,” said Bonfill, adding that the manuscripts they sorted through contained writings the director had composed as a teenager as well as items Almodóvar had seemingly written decades later. The collection, “The Last Dream,” will be published in English on Sept. 24 by HarperVia.“The Last Dream” is due out Sept. 24 in the United States.HarperVia, via Associated PressJust what this collection is exactly is as much of a mystery as the folders were. Was this a memoir? (One piece was a journal entry written a couple of years back.) Was it fiction — or sketches of ideas that could be fiction — unfinished stories the director never turned into a film? (There is a tale about Count Dracula joining a monastery in Spain.) Much like with his films, Almodóvar feels little need to clarify his output into any defined genre.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mariah Carey Says Her Mother and Sister Died on the Same Day

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      Ms. Carey, who has spoken and written extensively about her complicated relationship with her family, said the deaths had led to an “impossible time.”Mariah Carey’s mother, Patricia, and sister, Alison, died on the same day over the weekend, the pop star announced. It was unclear what caused their deaths or when exactly they died.“My heart is broken that I’ve lost my mother this past weekend,” Ms. Carey said in a statement. “Sadly, in a tragic turn of events, my sister lost her life on the same day.”Ms. Carey said that she had been able to spend the last week with her mother, adding, “I appreciate everyone’s love and support and respect for my privacy during this impossible time.”Patricia Carey, who was previously married to Alfred Roy Carey, was a Juilliard-trained opera singer and vocal coach. She and Mr. Carey, who was half Venezuelan and half Black, had two daughters, Alison and Mariah, and a son, Morgan Carey. Alfred Roy Carey died in 2002.Over the years, Ms. Carey, 55, has described the challenges she faced as a biracial child growing up on Long Island. She wrote more extensively about them in her 2020 memoir, “The Meaning of Mariah Carey.”She dedicated the book to her twins, Monroe and Moroccan Cannon, and her mother, writing: “And to Pat, my mother, who through it all, I do believe actually did the best she could. I will love you the best I can, always.”Ms. Carey, who established herself as one of pop music’s leading stars since emerging in the early 1990s, wrote that her relationship with her mother and siblings was fraught, saying that she at times felt like “an A.T.M. with a wig on” to her family.At one point, when Ms. Carey was exhausted, she sought refuge at a cabin she had purchased for her mother, who responded by calling the police. “She gave them an odd, knowing look,” Ms. Carey wrote, “which felt like the equivalent of a secret-society handshake, some sort of white-woman-in-distress cop mode.”The singer wrote that, like many aspects of her life, her relationship with her mother had been “anything but simple.”“Our relationship is a prickly rope of pride, pain, shame, gratitude, jealousy, admiration and disappointment,” Ms. Carey wrote. “A complicated love tethers my heart to my mother’s.”It was through singing that she often found a connection to her mother. Together they performed “O Come All Ye Faithful/ Hallelujah Chorus” in 2010 on Ms. Carey’s Christmas special on ABC.Ms. Carey’s relationship with Alison, her sister, was also strained. Alison Carey died at her home in Greene County, N.Y., more than 130 miles north of New York City, according to The Times Union. The Times Union said she was 63.Mariah Carey wrote in her memoir that at age 12, her sister had drugged her with Valium, offered a pinkie nail full of cocaine, inflicted her with third-degree burns and tried to sell her to a pimp.Ms. Carey wrote that she felt “emotionally and physically safer” not having any contact with her siblings. More

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      Monet, Taylor Swift, ‘Moana’: What Got Readers Through Their Grief

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      After our series on how artists have been affected by loss, we asked readers what helped them when they experienced it. These are 15 of their answers.Over the Memorial Day holiday weekend, we published The Grief Project, a series of interviews with artists who discussed the ways that loss affected their work and creativity. We also asked readers about the art and culture — whether it was a book, a movie, a song or anything else — that helped them remember or cope with losing a loved one. Hundreds responded. Here is what some of them said.Music‘As’ by Stevie WonderLike Stevie Wonder, Nancy Hanks wrote, her mother “was soulful and full of spirit, enriching the lives of all she came in contact with.”Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesI’m not sure if it’s the melody or lyrics, but this song deeply captures the deep feelings of love and profound grief that I feel for the loss of my mother. Throughout the song Stevie Wonder professes all the ways and lengths that the depth of his love reaches. He notes “did you know true love asks for nothing / her acceptance is the way we pay.” I often am reminded of this. The grief that I carry is a tax on the lifetime of unconditional love I’ve experienced from my mother. Like Stevie, she was soulful and full of spirit, enriching the lives of all she came in contact with. We couldn’t have the proper celebration we wanted for her because of Covid, but I imagine if we did, we would have played this song along with so many more of her favorites and danced all night. I can’t hear the song anymore without feeling a deep sense of longing for her. I’m so grateful for her life and legacy, and I miss her terribly. —Nancy Hanks, AtlantaFilm‘School of Rock’It was less than a week after we lost our 4-year-old daughter Laila to cancer, in 2004. A neighboring couple, who had been supportive throughout Laila’s illness, brought over a VHS tape of “School of Rock.” In those very early days of bereavement, as far as I knew, I would never laugh again. But we popped in the videocassette, and before long I found myself laughing out loud, along with the family and friends gathered with us. Although my sadness filled my entire soul, there was somehow still room for humor. The wondrous physics of hope, in a lesson delivered by Jack Black with his electric guitar. As a family, we rewatch “School of Rock” every now and then, and it never fails to uplift. To me, it will always be a symbol of resilience. —Mary Janevic, Ann Arbor, Mich.SportsThe New York RangersWatching the Rangers “offered tremendous comfort to my family,” wrote Pam Poling, whose sister was a fellow fan.Joel Auerbach/Getty Images/Getty ImagesOur sister died in December after an incredibly brief illness. She was our go-to person for all things hockey, especially our beloved Rangers. Watching them skate so beautifully this season offered tremendous comfort to my family. Whether they win or lose, we often text each other, “Joanie would have loved this.” It really helps. —Pam Poling, Fairfield, Conn.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      10 Artists on Living and Creating Through Grief

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      Sigrid Nunez, authorConor Oberst, musicianBridget Everett, performerBen Kweller, musicianJesmyn Ward, authorJustin Hardiman, photographerJulie Otsuka, authorLila Avilés, filmmakerRichard E. Grant, actorLuke Lorentzen, filmmakerWhen Jesmyn Ward was writing her 2013 book, “Men We Reaped,” she could feel the presence of her brother, who had been killed years earlier by a drunk driver. She still talks to him, as well as to her partner, who died in 2020.“This may just be wishful thinking, but talking to them and being open to feeling them answer, that enables me to live in spite of their loss,” she told me.While filming the HBO series “Somebody Somewhere,” Bridget Everett, playing a woman mourning the loss of her sister, was grieving the loss of her own. Working on the show was a way to still live with her, in a way, she said: “There’s something that’s less scary about sharing time with my sister when it’s through art or through making the show or through a song.”One of the many things you learn after losing a loved one is that there are a lot of us grieving out there. Some people are not just living with loss but also trying to create or experience something meaningful, to counter the blunt force of the ache.We talked to 10 artists across music, writing, photography, film and comedy about the ways their work, in the wake of personal loss, has deepened their understanding of what it means to grieve and to create.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Marlon Wayans on ‘Good Grief’ and the Death of His Parents

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      It’s not easy to build a long and lucrative career by making comedy that some people might be tempted to call silly or sophomoric. If it were, more comedians would be as successful as Marlon Wayans. Wayans, the youngest sibling in a family dynasty that also includes his brothers Damon, Shawn and Keenen Ivory Wayans and his sister Kim Wayans, has over the course of his 30-plus-year career scored in nearly every format. He has starred in broad sitcoms (the WB’s “The Wayans Bros.”), irreverent sketch comedy (“In Living Color”) and slapstick movies (“White Chicks”; the first two installments in the “Scary Movie” franchise), and released three, let’s say, Rabelaisian standup specials. His newest effort in that realm, “Good Grief,” will premiere on Amazon Prime Video on June 4.Listen to the Conversation With Marlon WayansThe comedian talks to David Marchese on becoming a different person after the death of his parents.In that special, Wayans, who has also carved out an impressive sideline as a supporting dramatic actor in films, is branching out by using comedy to work through some seriously heavy emotions. “Good Grief” is all about the death of his parents as well as the nearly 60 other loved ones he has lost in recent years.When I talked with Wayans, he was in Albuquerque, where he was filming a psychological horror movie for Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw production company — and, ahead of the first of our two conversations, getting ready to host a party for the cast and crew.Since you’re having a party tonight, it seems perfectly natural to talk about the subject of your new special: the death of your parents. Isn’t that crazy? Other people are like, What’s your next special? “Oh, it’s a funny journey about the death of my parents.” But it wasn’t just the death of my parents. I lost 58 people that I loved in a matter of three years. It felt, like, biblical.How do you find the funny thing in the sad thing? It’s been a gift since I was a kid. I mean, all of us Wayanses, we’re crazy people. The worst thing happens, and the first thing we’d think is What’s funny about it? I remember when my cousin Ceddy died and my auntie buried him in jeans and a T-shirt and some Air Force 1s and a baseball cap. Damon looks and goes, “If there’s a dress code in heaven, I don’t think Ceddy’s getting in.” More