A guy I knew who had worked for the Federal Aviation Administration told me about how he had once listened to some cockpit tapes of the final moments before a plane crashed.  He said that the last words uttered by the pilot or copilot were mostly either “Oh, shit!” or “Mommy!”

Needless to say, the ones that said “Oh, shit!” were expressing a realistic understanding of their impending doom; the ones that said “Mommy!” had regressed to their infancy.  It is my wish to die in my sleep some night, but if I should have to meet my end in a terrifying situation, I hope I’m the kind of guy who says, “Oh, shit!”

In general, I find it disturbing when someone’s mind gives way owing to an inability to face the reality of death.  It’s not that I am finding fault or blaming anyone who cannot accept that reality.  I am simply unnerved by it.

My parents had a dog, which they loved.  The dog lived for many years, but one night my mother got up to see what was wrong with her, only for her to die in my mother’s arms.  She woke my father up to tell him what happened. For the rest of the night, my father continued to pet the dog, insisting that she was only sleeping. Finally, in the morning, he accepted her death, and they had her buried.

In Gone With the Wind (1939), Rhett Butler and Scarlett have a daughter, whom they name Bonnie.  She is afraid of the dark, so she must have a light on in her room when she sleeps.  When she dies after being thrown from a horse, Rhett refuses to let her be buried because of her fear of the dark. He threatens to kill Scarlett when she insists that the funeral is set for the next day.  Only after a long night with Melanie does Rhett finally allow Bonnie to be buried.

The part of about Rhett’s refusal to accept Bonnie’s death is only a small part of Gone With the Wind.  In Mulholland Dr. (2001), on the other hand, the entire movie is predicated on the denial of death and the events that led up to it.  It is a story about a woman, Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts), who is so frustrated, depressed, and guilt-ridden that she pulls out a revolver and shoots herself in the head.  In the last moment of her life, she denies the horror of committing suicide with a fantasy about how things really are:  how she is destined to be a movie star, and that it is only dark, mysterious forces that are temporarily standing in her way; and how she has found true love with another woman, a woman that someone is trying to kill for some reason. That fantasy is the first part of the movie, and we eventually see how characters and events have been rearranged and substituted from the reality that is revealed in the second part:  how she had failed to get anywhere in the movies; and how the woman she loved had rejected her, and how in anger she had paid someone to kill her.  In referring to “the reality of the second part,” I mean only the physical reality.  As Diane’s mind begins to give way, she starts having hallucinations, but in this case, we know that they are not real.

Mulholland Dr. is a well-known and much-praised movie.  That cannot be said about the movie Siesta (1987), which a lot of critics did not care for, and which did not do well at the box office. However, it tapped into my dread of the inability to face death, and for that reason, I suppose, the movie made a lasting impression on me.

In that movie, Ellen Barkin plays a daredevil skydiver.  She agrees to jump from a plane at 25,000 feet without a parachute, falling into a huge net while it is on fire. As she falls through the air, she hallucinates that she is still in Spain.  By believing she never made it back to the United States, that means she cannot now be falling through the air to her death.

The title of this movie denotes sleeping during the day, when one is normally awake.  Sleeping suggests dreaming, which may take the form of a nightmare. However, sleep can also be a metaphor for death.  At the beginning of the movie, Barkin is asleep on the ground near an airport. She is wearing a red dress, a color that by itself suggests blood, but in addition, she has actual blood on her, which does not seem to be hers. Overhead, vultures are flying. This fantasy represents her impending death while at the same time trying to deny it.

Periodically, as Barkin tries to understand what is going on, supposedly over in Spain, where she is trying to get back to Los Angeles in time to make her jump, we abruptly see her in a black outfit, leaping from the plane and falling through the sky.  Each time the movie did this, it gave me a sickening feeling.