Article Written by Samuel Burnett.
SPOILER WARNING!!! THIS STORY CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR. IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE FILM AND HAVE PLANS TO DO SO, DO NOT READ. SERIOUSLY, DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE FILM. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!
Trigger warning: This article deals with death. Please be careful if this is a subject that that will bother you.
When I was fifteen, a man named Desmond Mann died and I was the last person to see him alive. He was the school chaplain and I would see him every day; Des and I would walk home from school and would argue about different characters in a novel series we were reading and whether or not they were actually the good guys. One day, we got to my street, parted ways as usual and I thought nothing of it.
Why would I?
The next day, we were made to attend an unplanned assembly. As we sat in place, I noticed some of the teachers were holding boxes of tissues and I remember joking “Who died?” I was proud to get a few laughs from the surrounding students.
I’m sure you can see where this is going.
We were informed that yesterday afternoon, due to an enlarged heart, Desmond Mann had been found dead in his house by his wife.
As everyone else stood up to continue with their day, I remember just sitting there. I wasn’t crying, I wasn’t shaking uncontrollably or doing anything that TV says we’re supposed to do. I was just sitting there.
I couldn’t remember the last thing he’d said to me but I assume it was some variation of “See you later” or something boring like that.
In The Lord of the Rings, Boromir gasps, “I would have followed you, my brother... My captain... My king” as Aragorn cradles his body.
Robert Muldoon manages to quip, “Clever girl” before being killed by a raptor.
And of course, there’s Romeo’s “Thus with a kiss I die.”
I had been taught well, death was a dramatic thing, occurring at the very end of a character’s arc and impressive last words were a must.
Des’ death was boring. Our last conversation didn’t sum up our friendship in any meaningful way, there was no declarations of affection and he was a young man. A young man doesn’t die of heart complications when he has other things to do with his life. It makes no sense. It’s the kind of cheap thing that happens when an actor quits before shooting their last scene.
Fifteen-year-old me just couldn’t reconcile this concept of death with what had happened.
It’s funny, I haven’t thought about Des in a very long time but when I saw Avengers: Infinity War, the last scene just brought him back.
In the climax of the film, Thanos obtains the final Infinity Stone and, with a single snap of his finger, he kills over half the main cast.
Peter Quill, T’Challa, Groot, Bucky Barnes, Drax, Mantis, Nick Fury, Maria Hill, and Peter Parker are just some of those killed.
What makes these deaths different to the ones I described before is this: there is no act of defiance, no final heroic quip in the face of imminent death, just expressions of shock, bewilderment and dismay. Before fading away, comedic fan favourite Star Lord manages to dejectedly sigh, “Aw, man.”
It comes so quickly that some characters don’t even realise that they are dying, continuing on until they simply stop, never knowing what happened.
Peter Parker, better known as Spider-Man, is even worse.
No quiet melancholy here, no bittersweet comment, the sixteen-year-old boy is blubbering, sobbing into Tony Stark’s chest as he dies, barely choking out a “Mr. Stark, I don’t want to go.”
These deaths are lacking in heroism, glory, and drama and, despite dramatic convention, they are all the stronger for it.
In real life, when we die, we very rarely get to be Boromir. It is extraordinarily unlikely we will leave life valiantly defending others with no thought to our own wellbeing, piles of defeated enemies surrounding us, a testament to our perseverance. We probably won’t go when it’s dramatically convenient either. There are going to be many loose ends. Odds are, we will have many conversations that will remain forever unspoken. There will be people that we never get around to making amends with. There will be that book we never wrote.
Oh, and don’t even get me started on this bizarre obsession with applying importance to last words. When I die, I doubt I will be fortunate enough to have some sharp, pithy one liner just rolling off my tongue. In all honesty, my last words will probably be some variation on the word, “Oops.”
I think that’s why this film hit me as hard as it did, because for once, our heroes died just like us.
At just a few minutes before midnight, sitting in an emptying theatre, one of the greatest surprise ending having just played out before me, all I could think about was a dead friend I hadn’t thought of in a very long time.
Death is a serious thing.
Death is a tragic thing.
But, death is very rarely a dramatic thing.
It is simply something that happens. We can’t stop it any more than we can stop the rise and fall of the sun. It’s unstoppable.
It’s inevitable.
And that’s why it scares us. Maybe that’s why we need to fill our stories with brave, dramatic, meaningful deaths.
It’s why no action movie will ever end with the main character dying because he tripped and fell over a handrail.
It’s our desperate, futile attempt to impose meaning and purpose on a part of life that has none.
Maybe it’s time that our stories began to reflect this. Maybe it’s time we faced death with a little bit of honesty and, God forbid, maybe a little less of the dramatic.
If The Walt Disney Company, the poster child for wish fulfilment and happy endings can learn this lesson, maybe finally, after all these years, it is time that I did the same.
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