The Dead

The Problem of Young Bones

 In James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, the wife recalls a young man who was in love with her and died some years before, and as she remembers him he seems to come more vividly alive in her imagination than her husband who stands in front of her. Joyce’s story may not have been influenced by cinema but it was written during the art form’s early years, the same year, 1914, that WWI started and where many young men would, like Michael Furey in Joyce’s story, be dead at a young age.  

     Cinema shows death at work as anybody from Andre Bazin to Jean Cocteau well knew, with film recording actors who will age and then die, their presence on screen the eventual absence that can lend poignancy to older works where nobody on screen is still alive. Yet perhaps there is a slightly different register of pathos when an actor we are watching on screen dies young. In Triangle of Sadness, we are witnessing a youthful and vivacious actress Charlbi Dean Kriek in a recent film, and will probably be aware that she is no longer alive while we are watching it. Other examples that access an element of this uncanniness might include James Dean, especially in Giant, Ian Charleson and Brad Davies in Chariots of Fire, Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits, the garagist Andre Salgues in Le Samourai, River Phoenix in The Thing Called Love, Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain, Katrin Cartlidge in Claire Dolan, and Katerina Golubeva in Pola X. What we want to do is not create an ever-expanding list of early deaths in film (Salgues's was far from early), but try and narrow the question down to say a little about the complexity of affect in a medium that has a storyline with characters, and actors who are passing through real time. Unless they have been animated or produced by CGI, everybody we watch on screen will be dying on film. But this isn’t in the diegetic sense where most major actors at some time in their screen careers will die either by a bullet or a knife, illness or an accident; it is in the awareness we have that all those actors will, if they are lucky, go grey, lose their hair, put on weight, lose muscle mass and gather wrinkles. If they are not so lucky they will not. They will be preserved in a youthful image for posterity but will have lost their lives in doing so. Whether this rests on them overdosing (Marilyn Monroe, River Phoenix), dying in an accident (James Dean) of an illness (Katrin Cartlidge, Ian Charleson, Brad Davis and Charlbi Dean Kriek), losing their life in what seems close to suicide (Monroe, Ledger) or in circumstances that remain publicly obscure (Golubeva), film is haunted both by their presence and their absence. If it is true that cinema is littered with inevitable corpses, by film recording people who will eventually die, this doesn’t seem to be quite the same. Let us call this a loss. Life like cinema is full of loss but it isn’t full of hauntings; a haunting suggests those deaths that sometimes surprise even if we never knew the person: a bench we sit on and find the person passed away at thirty; the gravestone we pass and we discover a child died at eight. 

   But how do such hauntings work on film and in film? Do we find ourselves watching the film differently? This will depend on the viewer, and what we are looking for in a film, but when the wife in ‘The Dead’ recalls Furey, she is conjuring up a ghost differently we might assume than if she were talking of a relation or a friend who died in their seventies or eighties. Such a person needn’t haunt another with a life not lived, but when we think of some of the actors we will pay attention to here, then we might find ourselves speculating on that life and how it might have developed: how they might have looked, how successful they may have become, how embittered or happy. It is why when we invoked Giant we said especially Giant, and did so because James Dean does age in that film, an epic account of Texan lives that shows him from the young man he was to the old man Dean himself never became. We can watch scenes in the film and muse over how he might have looked as an older man. In another epic, Once Upon a Time in America, we look at Robert De Niro in the film and then view him as he is now, a man older still than the one he played in Leone’s movie. There need be nothing poignant in watching De Niro; there might be immense poignancy watching Dean. Dean’s, more than most is a legendary death and not least because it was unequivocal and accidental. There are definitive demises that are not accidental even if they are contingent: Rock Hudson and Anthony Perkins dying of HIV. Then there are the deaths that are possibly accidental but not definitive, including Marilyn Monroe and Heath Ledger. But Dean’s death in a car crash was undeniable and conclusive, and his career astonishingly brief. He was twenty-four years old and had acted in only three films: all of them in leading roles, and all of them significant works for major filmmakers: Elia Kazan’s East of Eden, Nicholas Ray’s A Rebel without a Cause and George Stevens’s Giant. Marilyn was still young when she died (thirty-six) but she was also in more than thirty films, with the viewer able to see her if not grow old then at least grow up and mature on screen. The difference between All About Eve and The Misfits is marked. Monroe’s character in the latter might seem as keen to please as in the former, but there is a maturity of experience that in All About Eve is instead ingenue naivety. Monroe was always good at playing dumber than she was and sophisticated enough a performer to suggest within the story that she was smarter than the other characters’ expectations of her. But that comedic wit wasn’t the same as dramatic gravitas, and this is what she brings to The Misfits. In a scene, she realises that Clark Gable’s horses aren’t for riding; they are for slaughter, and she lies on her side as Gable tries to placate her. The shot is a four-minute take and she needs Gable to express how much he can love now that she feels he can kill. How can he be the kind man she assumed him to be if he can murder these helpless creatures? There was frequently an aspect in Monroe’s performances that contained and insisted on kindness, but it was often camouflaged by her astonishing capacity to seduce. Here, now in her mid-thirties, in a script written by her husband and perhaps the most significant American playwright of the post-war years, Arthur Miller, the flirtation becomes instead more pronounced feeling. Before The Misfits, Monroe had absorbed aspects of the Method and the techniques of post-war American theatre. There was emotion memory and a memory of emotion. Monroe trained with Lee Strasberg and found techniques that were useful. “Marilyn was already a wonderful actor, but she wanted to steer her career toward more artistically fulfilling work, more substantial parts, and she wanted to expand and improve her craft—and Strasberg became part of that mission.” (Criterion) Our point is one can watch Monroe’s career over more than a decade and see it develop; no such opportunity was available to Dean, though he was lucky to have been in three major films at the very start. If Monroe’s first three (Dangerous Years, Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! and Ladies of the Chorus) were all we had, she would have become posthumously unknown. 

     Just as we might wish to differentiate between types of death (however morbid the thought), we can also distinguish between the brevity of a young actor’s arc. We have seen with Monroe that arc was surprisingly vast, and in Dean hardly an arc at all: three films released within two years. Two of which were unreleased at the time of his death. Heath Ledger’s arc was somewhere in between as he offered a range of roles from early Australian soaps to secondary parts in films like The Patriot and Monster’s Ball, and a stardom with variations by the mid-2000s. He may have only been 28 when he died, but there were still transitions in this short career. He appeared in more than twenty films, and the later ones included Brokeback Mountain, Candy, I’m Not Here and The Dark Knight. In probably his most moving film, Brokeback Mountain, he of course survives and the other leading character, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, dies. But the film manages to make tragic Ledger’s forlorn life after his death over Gyllenhaal’s offscreen and ambiguous demise. Within the context of the film, we might have thought that if Gyllenhaal’s character lived, he would have got over his love for Ledger and found it with another man. There are hints at its possibility when Gyllenhaal seems to take another lover. But Ledger is left with memories and haunting loss, treasuring Gyllenhaal’s shirt, living in a trailer park and looking at the photograph of Brokeback Mountain, where their love affair took place each year. Yet we are partly and retrospectively moved watching the film because we have a reversal: one of the characters is dead at the end of the film but, watching it only three years after its release, the character who is alive is the one who has passed away. We shouldn’t make too much of this — plenty of people were very moved when it first came out. However, we shouldn’t deny an added poignancy the film possesses now. We watch Ledger play a character locked in on himself and someone who doesn’t quite know how to live. He is coping with a kid growing up and a wife he cannot love as she would wish, and we have the added awareness that Michelle Williams, who plays his wife, and Ledger, had a child together. If it is fair to say we shouldn’t exaggerate these resonances, we might also wonder why academic film studies has made so little of them. If somebody chose to rewatch Brokeback Mountain not long after Ledger’s death, they wouldn’t only be watching a diegetic weepie, but also a nondiegetic one as well - watching with the awareness of the tragic demise within the story that is Gyllenhaal’s, but also the tragic death beyond it that was Ledger’s.

   Is such thinking idle gossip, as though any attention we give beyond the film we are watching is a dereliction of aesthetic duty? There is some justification to the claim, and perhaps can best be understood by looking at the philosophy of aesthetic feeling. Whether it is Aristotle’s notion of emotional release (loosely catharsis), or Kant’s idea of disinterest, both emphasise the containment of the aesthetic experience. Aristotle believes: that for example, "... Desire, anger, pity and in general pleasure and distress can be experienced in greater or lesser degree, and in both cases wrongly. To feel them at the right time in response to the right thing, with regard to the right people, for the right reason, and in the right way — that is the mean and the optimum, which is the characteristic of virtue.” (Nicomachean Ethics) Kant reckoned that: “interest is defined as a link to real desire and action, and thus also to a determining connection to the real existence of the object. In the aesthetic judgment per se, the real existence of the beautiful object is quite irrelevant.” (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy) We respond to the character of Oedipus, not the actor playing him, just as we respond to an artwork without showing much concern for the person painting it. 

    There are good reasons why, and we have come across some of them in recent years where numerous viewers are getting themselves in a moral muddle over deciding whether one ought to access an aesthetic experience when made by a monster, or a perceived monster. Claire Dederer’s account is amongst the best known. “I took the fucking of Soon-Yi as a terrible betrayal of me personally. When I was young, I felt like Woody Allen. I intuited or believed he represented me on-screen. He was me.” Dederer also says: “They did or said something awful, and made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can’t watch or listen to or read the great work without remembering the awful thing.” (‘What Are We to Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?’) Dederer’s article became famous and five years later she commented on it in another one for the Guardian. “This is what I tell the students: consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist that might disrupt the consuming of the art; the biography of the audience member that might shape the viewing of the art. Your biography, your feelings are important.” If we can’t not know what we know, that doesn’t mean we can no longer feel for the artwork on its own terms. This is what Aristotle, Kant and others have taught us. We suspend disbelief in the absorption of the art, but that doesn’t mean this suspension must become naive on the one hand or knowing on the other. Someone who watches a burning fire in a film and finds themselves running out of the theatre to get some oxygen is certainly taking the experience seriously, but who would deny they are taking it too seriously? At the other extreme, the person who can’t believe the period drama they are watching, because nobody in the 18th century would have a camera to film it, is offering a degree of scepticism equal to the naivety of the susceptible. But they are no more helpful a viewer. 

   Perhaps we can understand the question by analogy, and the Gestalt experiments that show us two things simultaneously but that we see distinctly. Then we change our perspective ever so slightly and the vase becomes two faces; the old woman’s face becomes a young woman. In film, we are both scared by the story but still aware that we have to make the last bus home. If the fear of missing the bus is greater than that the film generates, the film isn’t quite working, yet there are realities beyond the viewing experience that ought to be in abeyance, though they are unlikely to disappear. There is no point pretending that the aesthetic experience is as pure as we might wish it to be, but should it be so easily ruined by the viewer who judges what is on screen by events they have read about offscreen? It is clear that in film we have characters and we have actors, just as we have filmmakers who create fictional worlds that we accept for the duration of the viewing experience. What we are arguing for is an awareness that there is always more to that experience than the diegetic, but there is always more in the film than there is beyond it. Much criticism has been predicated on ignoring anything that isn’t signified by the text itself, and New Criticism for example was a famous instance of this approach. “New Criticism made the literary work the center of critical attention, and denied, or at least greatly devaluated, the relevance of facts about the origin of literary works, their effects upon individual readers, and their personal, social, and political influence.” Michael Wreen adds:“close reading is what is required of a critic, not biographical information about the author, a rundown of the state of society at the time the work was written, data about the psychology of creation, predictions about the effects of the work on society, and certainly not a piece of autobiography detailing the critic’s own personal response to the work.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Film is not literature but when we see how often academically inclined critics talk of the text and speak of the character without acknowledging beyond parenthesis that a specific actor is playing that character, it can seem to undermine an important aspect that makes film distinct from literature. The idea there is nothing outside the text can appear relatively true to fiction based on words; it is far less so when it comes to recorded images. Film is closer to a celluloid (and in turn digital) palimpsest: it turns the images of the world into images on screen, even if that original world is that of a studio. The studio will still rely on actors playing roles and production designers creating sets that exist in the real world, however artificial they may look. A ‘prop’ or a ‘costume’ in a book is worthless but from a film worth a fortune. Audrey Hepburn’s black dress in Breakfast at Tiffany’s sold for close to a million dollars. “At least 3 copies of this dress are known to have survived. One is in Givenchy's archive, one is on display in a costume museum in Madrid and one was sold at auction in 2006 for a sophisticated €807,000.” (Catawiki) Marilyn Monroe’s dress from The Seven Year Itch went for €4.6m. Even when film might seem at its most artificial, it is real enough for the objects in it to be worth large sums of money. Dresses in literature remain no more (and no less) than words on a page, and no money can be exchanged for anything within the book - only the book itself, which is an object and can be worth as much as a film prop.

      All this is to say that film has a certain type of reality absent from many other art forms and an important part of this reality is the actor on screen. It is naive to pretend it isn’t important, just as it is missing the point to see it as all important. But when someone dies young, when all we have of their life on screen is a number of years rather than an extended existence, it can give to the experience a poignancy or a mystery, one that gives texture to the film even it isn’t diegetically pertinent. A good example of this terrible irony is in Chariots of Fire, with Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson) up against the American Jackson Scholz (Brad Davis). In the film, before the race, Scholz is one of the favourites and Liddell expected to do badly — he is a sprinter whose religious beliefs have led him to forego the hundred metres and to run in the four hundred instead. Scholz hands him a note with a biblical quote on it, and while this is a touching enough moment as Scholz shows respect for a fellow athlete, it can seem more so when watching the film retrospectively. Both actors will be dead within a decade of the film’s release, both from HIV. There is a complicity in the scene between the two characters but we might wonder if there is a broader complicity between two actors who were gay, as if the gaze they share within the story there to imply decency, can contain because of the actors playing the roles a sexual dimension we can read into the film even if it isn’t part of its intentionality. Then, we have their youthful deaths adding another layer to a scene that has nothing to do with the the story the film tells. 

   It is a common enough claim that critics and academics read too much into films, and yet this can take manifold forms. It might rest on symbolic assumption — that a given shot means abstractly a particular thing. It might be the mushroom-like building outside an apartment in Antonioni’s The Eclipse, which some may insist resembles the nuclear cloud, or it could be Cool Hand Luke as a Jesus figure in the Paul Newman film, the shark in Jaws symbolizing savagery. This might seem a much more honourable over-reading than our example from Chariots of Fire, but it is also the type of interpretation practised by other art forms, from painting to literature. It isn’t that it is wrong but it isn’t at all special to film, and can sometimes feel like a stale hermeneutic useful for student essays but not always very enlightening. It is a way of stating the obvious without regurgitating the story. Reading into the scene from Chariots of Fire, and also then reading into it retrospectively after both actors died young, can seem both irrelevant and impertinent. That it isn’t what the story is about (nothing in the film proposes these are gay men) and impertinent as we find ourselves reading into the film a history that belongs to two actors who happen to appear in it. Shouldn’t we be leaving their private lives alone?

    Yet while often symbolism can be abstractly impositional, the sort of response that equates actors with characters might be concretely emotional: that we watch the film and have certain affects as a consequence of knowledge that we can’t not know. If we say we are moved by this scene more in re-watching it say in the mid-nineties than when we watched it on its original release, and are aware of the actors’ deaths, then we aren’t imposing a reading onto the film. Our awareness of a broader reality beyond the film is making us feel certain things that we aren’t quite feeling by virtue of the story alone. This could be read as a failing of the work (it hasn’t moved us enough by its story) or a failure of the viewer (who confuses the diegesis with the world beyond it). But perhaps it is better to see this as a dimension of cinema that shouldn’t be underestimated, certainly shouldn’t be ignored, and may be a more fruitful form of hermeneutics than symbolism as it arrives at very special forms of affect. We have take a minor scene in a film that is mainly viewed as a conservative, even jingoistic account of the 1924 Olympics, and Britain’s success at the games, and extracted from it the most dissident of readings. But first of all, we don’t want to reduce Chariots of Fire to a piece with so clear a jingoistic meaning and, secondly, this isn’t especially a reading — our purpose hasn’t been to radicalise a staid text, to put a bit of queer thinking into a heteronormative work. It has been to acknowledge an affect produced by the poignancy of rewatching a film and seeing it slightly anew because of new information beyond the story itself.

     If we can regard such an approach as a theory of film, it wouldn’t of course rest on the examples we can come up with as if they prove the theory. Viewers might watch Chariots of Fire, Brokeback Mountain or The Misfits and feel that they have never much cared for any of these stars and the films move them based on the characters and their predicaments. They have nothing to do with the actors’ deaths. But they might come up with other examples, with actors they are more emotionally invested in and thus wouldn’t be rejecting the theory. Someone else, however, may say they know nothing about an actor’s private life, regard any interest in it as gossip, and are only concerned by character and situation — and how well the filmmakers involve us in their plight. They might insist on the ideas of New Criticism and reject any theory of affect based on the extra-diegetic. But while this might be a well-argued position for literature, as we have noted, it seems less tenable cinematically, where film relies on so many world coordinates in its making. We aren’t remotely saying that the most important aspect of film is its relationship with the sort of information many might regard as gossip, but we are saying it is not an unimportant one. From a certain point of view, it doesn’t matter who plays Hamlet, King Lear or Willy Loman — what matters is that they play the character well. However, this seems less true of cinema than the theatre (and might not be entirely true of theatre either, but that is another story), partly because the actor is incarnating the character differently. The written play will assume any number of actors will play the role; in cinema the assumption is that only one actor will play the part, even if there will in the future be remakes, sequels with another actor and so on. It would be a rare play (and probably an instant failure) that will have only one actor play a given character, but in film there are numerous examples. Al Pacino is Michael Corleone, Cary Grant Roger O Thornhill, Gene Hackman Popeye Doyle, Diane Keaton Annie Hall. Other actors could go on to play the role but they wouldn’t only be the character, they would be well aware that in stepping into a role they are also potentially stepping on another actor’s toes. This will of course depend on how iconic the original would appear: nobody is likely to feel Jeff Goldblum is taking liberties in The Fly, but who could replace Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name? Film generally aims to create a much greater weld of actor and character than the theatre. 

   If so, then how easy is it to separate one from the other, and once we accept this, should we also acknowledge that the investment includes accepting the actor is an extra-diegetic aspect of the film, and their lives an aspect of that extra-diegetic reality? If we think of Charlbi Dean Kriek in Triangle of Sadness, we are watching a beautiful young woman who may be new to film but isn’t new to being in the public eye. She was a model for a decade, had been in several film and TV shows in small roles, and had a severe accident at eighteen that left her with a broken wrist, a collapsed lung and four broken ribs. Her spleen was also removed. In the film, there is evidence of that accident in a scar on the stomach the film chooses not to comment upon nor hide: the two most likely avenues in film, where a scar becomes a narrative device, a backstory revelation, or absent altogether. It is a scar from the removed spleen, and this is potentially what killed her. She didn’t quite have the resources to fight a specific infection. The film was released in Cannes while she was alive, but by the time of its general release she was dead, and so viewers were watching both her co-star Harris Dickinson and Kriek, and yet watching one in the present tense and the other in the past: she was in Triangle of Sadness; he is in Triangle of Sadness. Sure, both have appeared in a film that has since been made, but he continues to be in a film that gives to his work a present tense quality now absent from Kriek’s. The question is do we then watch the film and view the actors differently? Of course not especially, and yet perhaps not in quite the same way either. If both Kriek and Dickinson are presented as attractive people, we may notice that scar on Kriek’s belly and see it not as a plot detail awaiting revelation. It becomes a harbinger of the death that awaits the actress if we watch the film knowing of her death and how she died. As we’ve noted, many a film that presents a character scarred will later reveal how the character has come to possess it, and usually this scar is the work of a make-up artist rather than a result of misfortune in their personal life, from Freddy Krueger to indeed Ledger as the Joker. But director Ruben Ostlund does nothing with it narratively nor does he conceal it, and so it is there on screen just as Kriek is no longer here in life, and we may see in this scar thus the foreshadowing of a future that is the actress’s demise in a present that is the screen narrative where she lives. However, we may also think of the film’s ending, where it looks like she might be killed. The various survivors from an attack on a luxury yacht find themselves adrift on an island, and the previous hierarchies are no longer valid. Dickinson becomes the love slave of one of the ship’s female members of staff, a tough Filipino who realises she has more know-how than the rest and quickly capitalises on it. Kreik and this woman venture to another part of the island to see what is there, and we sense that Kreik isn’t likely to make the return journey. The film ends and we don’t know if she will be killed and again we have a horribly interesting reversal. In most films, we know a character dies, but the actor (especially if young) is, when we watch a film at the time of its release, alive. Here, the character looks like she might die but many a viewer will be aware that Kriek herself has passed away.  

   Such thoughts are indeed morbid, but we know from Bazin and Barthes, from their remarks on film and photography, that morbidity can be seen as an important aspect of the art forms as they needn’t be in literature, painting, theatre or sculpture. In literature, painting and sculpture, they are abstract arts, while theatre is so immediate it is presently present, a performance in front of our eyes and not one that separates temporally the actor and the viewer. They needn’t invoke the morbid. But film and photography have this spectre; as though we could play with a Jacques Derrida term and think of Bazin’s famous phrase as the ‘hauntological ambiguity of reality’ — with film not just creating ambiguity in the image but of the image as well. The hauntological ambiguity would be the temporal mismatch of the recording of the film and its viewing; that the film is unfolding for now narratively, but has unfolded pro-filmically in the past for the actors within it. Most of the time with newer films there need be no tragic aura to this discrepancy, no need for us to muse over the gap, but in Triangle of Sadness, or the James Dean films that came out just after his death, this gap can seem all the more pronounced. It might be exceptional that a performer and especially a young one dies before the film is released, but its rarity shouldn’t blind us to what it fundamentally reveals about film.

    One can think here of an actor who was far from young, and far from a celebrity: André Salgues. He has a very brief role early in Le Samourai, playing the garagist. The film’s director Jean-Pierre Melville says in Melville on Melville that between filming the shot of the garagist and the counter shot of Alain Delon, the actor died. If we can find it hauntological that an actor passes away within the space of a few months between filming and release, how much more uncanny can it seem between one shot and the next? Few except Salgade’s family and friends would have mourned his passing, while millions may have mourned Dean’s, and many were shocked by Krieb’s. But Salgade’s more than most captures an aspect of cinema as mechanical production pressing living bodies into celluloid shadows. Delon nods back at a dead man, one alive in the previous shot. Few will know of this detail, and beyond Sagade’s circle and the crew, and those who have read Melville’s interview, nobody will make anything of this when watching the film. While with Krieb that number will be many, and in Dean’s case most, all three actors are nevertheless helpful in understanding cinema’s discrepant relationship with time.

     Actors must be aware that though they might appear for a very small percentage of their lives onscreen, this time will be magnified like the image itself, so that if we think of an actor who has appeared in thirty films that takes up sixty hours of screen time, that is less than three days in a person’s life. Yet it can represent a longevity that goes far beyond their mortality. When an actor dies young, those onscreen hours might seem all the more precious, as if the hours lived were relatively short and must be recuperated in the hours on celluloid or digital film. River Phoenix died at an even younger age than James Dean, and might have had only three or four films in his filmography were he not already a teen star, having appeared in Stand By Me, The Mosquito Coast, Running on Empty and others. It may have left only Sneakers, My Own Private Idaho, Silent Tongue and the film he was making when he died: The Thing Called Love. Instead, Phoenix can seem a star halfway between Monroe and Dean: someone whose death has an element of Dean’s very youthful demise, but also an aspect of Monroe’s trajectory. We do see Phoenix age and mature on screen, even if only from pre-pubescence, onto adolescence and on to early adulthood. Commentators have also given Phoenix a continuing career partly based on the roles he was going to take, those he was thinking of taking, and others for which he would have been suited. "Christian Slater was given the role of Daniel Malloy [in Interview with the Vampire] upon the death of River Phoenix, the original choice for the role. Slater donated his $250,000 salary to two of Phoenix's favorite charities.” (Imdb) Imdb also tells us that River Phoenix was James Cameron’s first choice to play Jack Dawson in Titanic. “By the time the movie was made, River Phoenix had died and Leonardo DiCaprio had reached the perfect age.” How many roles taken by Slater, DiCaprio, Johnny Depp and others might have gone to Phoenix, commentators have wondered. With a youthful death, there is often this dimension of what might have been, but film exacerbates it by wondering what sort of roles an actor might ideally have played if they had continued living.

   This is all the more so if an actor has left promise unfulfilled. With Dean, this wasn’t so, according to Yukio Mishima, who glorifies Dean’s youthful death believing there really wasn’t anything more to expect. According to Mishima, Dean was attractive but not beautiful, talented but not brilliant. He left three impressive films and died in a car crash that helped define him. For a dealth-cult figure like Mishima (who would die in 1968 after committing hari-kari), Dean’s death was perfect. Any extension of his life would have been needlessly hanging around. Many may find Mishima’s short piece on Dean (available at Literary Hub) gruesomely disturbing, especially if aware of his own even more terrible demise a little over a decade after the American actor. But Mishima could be right that Dean’s career needn’t invoke the speculative as it might with Phoenix, with perhaps Phoenix’s one significant film My Own Private Idaho and to a lesser extent his final work, The Thing Called Love, showing where he might have gone as an actor. There was no sense that his teen years were likely to have been his best. What is also unusual is that Phoenix’s younger brother has become one of the best actors in America, and yet in no way resembles River in his screen persona. The sort of roles Joaquin Phoenix has taken, including To Die For, We Own The Night, The Master and Joker are distinct from the sort of roles people would have expected River Phoenix to have possibly appeared in: not just Interview with a Vampire or Titanic, but perhaps Don Juan de Marco, Romeo and Juliet and Good Will Hunting. DiCaprio and Matt Damon have filled River’s shoes much more than Joaquin and there is no sense in which the younger brother is a lesser figure than his older brother, just a different one.

    Neither Katrin Cartlidge nor Katia Golubeva were youthful deaths. Cartlidge was forty-one and Golubeva forty-four. Monroe died when she was in her mid-thirties. But they were premature deaths in different ways: Cartlidge seemed somehow to be starting out, and Golubeva always carried in her persona a dark aspect that made her a nocturnal muse for three directors: Sharunas Bartas, Claire Denis and Leos Carax. Cartlidge was best known for working with Mike Leigh, and Leigh has frequently talked about her loss, saying just after she died: “…the hardest thing of all is to face the unbearable truth that Katrin Cartlidge will never again make her magical contribution to my films. This devastating fact leaves me very sad indeed. It is a terrible loss.” (Guardian) Many years later he believed, “the small clutch of films that she will be known and remembered for are a legacy. People should watch them and celebrate her.” (Independent) However, if Cartlidge looked like an actor who was likely to go in numerous directions, someone who started in Brookside, popped up in films all over Europe, and who starred in the American indie work Claire Dolan, Golubeva was, according to taste, typecast, or possessed a personality so singular that it was hardlfor a director to deviate from the givens her persona insisted upon. With Cartlidge the viewer didn’t quite know what they were getting, as Cartlidge believed: “I think a lot of people thought Katrin Cartlidge is playing a prostitute, great, let's go and see it. But I think they were disappointed.’ (Guardian) While her Naked co-star David Thewlis would say while he predictably allowed himself to be seduced by Hollywood, he never knew where Cartlidge would pop up. “She went the European route.” Another Naked actor and Leigh regular, Lesley Sharp, noted: You wouldn’t see her for a bit, and then suddenly you’d find out she’d been in Slovenia making a film, or she’d been working with folks in Bucharest. (Independent). Cartlidge wasn’t mysterious; she was surprising. She seemed a figure of centripetal energy who looked like she was escaping her televisual origins and searching out the cinematically demanding. She appeared in Breaking the Waves, Before the Rain and No Man’s Land, never needing to be the centre of attention and played often peripheral characters. She was an actress whose parts looked like they reflected her life if we think of Thewlis and Sharp’s comments. It wasn’t so much that she was a character actor; more a leading performer in retreat, finding often smaller roles that carried greater interest because of the film’s overall design rather than focusing on her specific career trajectory. Hence the surprise: the viewer never quite knew where they would find her next: in a Chekhov adaptation, a film about the war in the Balkans, a nurse on the island of Skye, a prostitute in New York. Her death robbed us of surprises and the demise itself was a terrible surprise. As Leigh describes it: “She’d gone to Paris with her parents and her boyfriend for a birthday, and when she came back, she got poorly and died…and nobody’s ever quite established what it was that caused it. It came out of the blue, and it was devastating.” (Independent)

     In contrast, Golubeva’s death was not unexpected. In I Am Katya Golubeva her son says “she told me she would never be old. It means that she had thought about it.” But this isn’t only about her personal life, which according to the film was troubled and complicated, or rather whatever the nature of that life, it might be assumed from the films that it was difficult. In I Am Katya Golubeva, people speak of Golubeva somehow living the parts she played, or wondering if the private life was the role; the acting life the reality. Whether or not Golubeva was playing herself, she consistently presented a persona. If this was her own doing or due to the filmmakers she worked with might be hard to discern, but the directorial sensibilities of Bartas, Carax, Denis and also Bruno Dumont (who cast her in Twenty Nine Palms) are distinct, yet Golubeva’s roles consistent. Whether passing through I Can’t Sleep, haunting Pola X, troubled and all but silent in Twenty Nine Palms, or a catatonic onlooker in Bartas’s House, there are few leading actors with fewer lines than Golubeva. This would be a mixture of pragmatism and principle. Dumont admitted that “my first choice was to work with only English-speaking American actors, but the financial partners in the film wanted 50 percent of the dialogue to be in French. I’d met Katia Golubeva in Los Angeles. She spoke very bad French. That she was Russian was incidental to the story — I had absolutely no geopolitical intentions. So, interestingly, the two of them could barely communicate.” (IndieWire) In Bartas’ work with Golubeva it becomes a principle: as though language is trapped inside a person and it gives to Bartas’s close-ups a quality that isn’t unique but it is uncommon. It finds its perfect encapsulation in Golubeva, and it is a quality we find in most of her work. When asked about his close-ups, Bartas says “very rarely one encounters a film that does not employ close-ups. A close-up is a very common shot in all films.” (East European Bulletin) But most films also see the close up functionally: it moves in close as a character talks, or to show a reaction to events on a person’s face. Bartas’s close ups in his work with Golubeva rarely do this, and so the close up becomes a question, one that assumes it can interrogate a face but cannot possibly understand it. This quality became a feature of Golubeva’s work with other directors. All actors work on a scale between the voluble and the taciturn, and we often expect minimal words from Eastwood, McQueen, Delon, Deneuve and Vitti, if for different reasons. From Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, Elizabeth Taylor and Bette Davis we expect the close up to lead to words and it often does. But few actors have said less than Golubeva; suggesting a sorrow beyond words but contained in a face that can exquisitely register melancholy. If sadness is surely a more stable emotion than happiness, few actors have better reflected this stability of register than Golubeva. 

   Writing just after she died, David Thomson said, “her death, which is rumoured to have been by her own hand, came only at the age of 44. But like a latter-day Louise Brooks, her iconic image will forever remain alive with us on the screen. (Sight and Sound) Whatever the circumstances of Golubeva’s death, it is understandable that after it there were rumours of suicide: her work seems to invite such a reading as Cartlidge’s would not. We needn’t confuse life with film to understand that they are nevertheless hard to separate from the perspective of the public domain. The interviews, the red carpets, the gossip; these aren’t real life either, and might better be regarded as extra-diegetic features of the filmic experience. They augment the narrative by allowing the star to give an extra dimension to the persona. It may be so that interviews in the past were much more vivid, extended and apparently open. As music journalist Mick Brown reckoned: “I was doing a lot of music interviews in the early part of my career, and I would be allowed to go on the road with Elvis Costello and Queen. Now you have to negotiate to get an hour. What you're trying to do is establish a rapport with somebody and make it a conversation, not an interview. If you haven't got long, the possibilities for that kind of relaxation – and revelation – become less.” (Guardian) But that doesn’t mean they weren’t just as much part of the persona as more recent junkets. The difference might be found less in the honesty of the performers, than the honesty of the films and music — as if art’s purpose during the sixties and seventies was to offer an authenticity increasingly hard to come by but still pertinent to the sort of work Golubeva was engaged in. If the films were offering something that passes for a truth, then the actors appearing in them were part of this broader honesty and would be inclined to function more sincerely in the broader persona offered to the world. This needn’t be the same as their real-life but more a question of integrity to the work they had to be honest towards. Is that type of integrity relevant to a superhero film or a broad rom-com? 

      This means in certain instances that an actor’s life can’t easily be extricated from their work, and even their death. When an actor crashes their car; when an actress overdoses on barbiturates, or an actor dies of HIV, this may or may not fit the public persona. But if it does then that death will become part of the actor they are perceived to be. Dean’s death ‘suited him’, which is an appalling thing to say but pertinent in understanding the James Dean myth. Equally, Monroe dying of an overdose seems to fit with our perception of a woman of anxiety trying so hard to please. Not all actors' deaths are consistent with their lives, and we might think of Philip Seymour Hoffman dying of a heroin overdose, or Adrienne Shelley’s murder, as deaths that seem to have little do with their screen personae. They died just like everybody else we have discussed, but their deaths don’t signify: they don’t augment the image. With Golubeva her death remains a mystery, just as her persona was amongst the most mysterious of screen presences. Golubeva was never a star as Marilyn Monroe undeniably was and as James Dean unequivocally became posthumously. But, as she lies in a modest grave not easy to find in Pere Lachaise cemetery, we may watch her films without at all feeling that her death is contrary to her image. 

     What we have tried to explore in this macabre essay is what usually an early death means cinematically, what echoes and refrains it creates in the films that we are watching long after the star has died. None of these stars made old bones, to use a phrase Truman Capote offered when writing on Marilyn Monroe, and we might define ‘young bones’ as anyone under fifty, anyone whose life seems to have been curtailed when the average life span in the west is now almost eighty, though usually a little younger for men; older for women. Someone more taxonomically inclined might wish to see young death as under thirty, unfortunate deaths as forty, and early deaths as fifty. But as we have seen a young death is perceptual as readily as factual: James Dean was only a year older than River Phoenix when he died, and appeared in far fewer films, but his career seems oddly complete as Phoenix’s doesn’t. Monroe produced a large body of work but died in her mid-thirties; Charlbi Dean Kriek was thirty two — but her film career was only starting. If age is but a number, in film terms it also matters how many films one has been in and the impact of that work. To speak of a premature death is also to evaluate it, and critically our purpose has been partly to wonder how complete or incomplete an actor’s professional life has been and not only their personal one. In The Misfits, one of the characters says to Monroe, “here's to your life Roz, I hope it goes on forever.” It only went on for another year after the film, but she also made enough films, and created enough of a legacy, that in 2022 “Pop artist Andy Warhol’s image of Marilyn Monroe, one of his best-known portraits, has smashed records after selling for $195m in New York in less than four minutes of bidding.” (Guardian) From a professional perspective, Monroe died at the right time, just as James Dean did too. Golubeva, meanwhile left a work that almost functions as the inverse of Monroe’s: the actress not from the sunny US but a dusky Russia. While Monroe was all smiles, Golubeva had an omnipresent pout. If Monroe was a star; Golubeva was dark matter, someone that commercial cinema could never have done very much with, even if the documentary proposes she could have ended up in a Bond film if she hadn’t hidden from the producers. However, like Monroe, she died at the right time for the persona: she leaves around seven films over fifteen years that reflect a preoccupation with abject states around the turn of the millennium. While Monroe captured better than most post-war American prosperity; Golubeva reflected communist collapse. She was in this sense a collapsed star, and hence the dark matter.  

   A young death may not confer on anybody making their way in the film world a passport to immortality. Charlbi Dean Kriek’s death is very sad but it isn’t significant and even River Phoenix’s demise at so young an age (or more specifically so early a stage of his professional life), left him with too nebulous a filmography to become much more than a footnote to cinema. Heath Ledger seems to have died too young, leaving perhaps too few films (no matter Brokeback Mountain and The Dark Knight) to become legendary. Clearly, in the wider scheme of things, in the traffic of celebrity, Ledger and Phoenix are bigger names than Golubeva. A Google search will instantly show the magnitude of Ledger and Phoenix’s fame, but that is celebrity rather than iconography: a gossip column curiosity over an image which has been built up as persona. Anybody who knows Golubeva’s work, will see a consistent, intense personality much stronger than Ledger’s or Phoenix’s, and in its own way closer to Monroe’s or Dean’s. She seems an actress who exists in the shadows, suspicious of light, an actress of the nocturnal or the despairing, like Beatrice Dalle (another Denis favourite), or Charlotte Rampling. 

      What is the purpose of a life? A more profound question than an article about film star deaths can hope to answer. But one way of narrowing it down and remaining on topic is to say what constitutes a full life cinematically. What sort of longevity, what number of films, or what type of consistency in the films one makes, constitutes a filmography of value? This is clearly a qualitative rather than a quantitive question, with Dean proving three films in two years is enough, while Monroe needed to work for a decade before becoming ‘Marilyn Monroe’ — and Golubeva needed to add French films to her Lithuanian ones with Bartas to reflect a despair that could cross borders. Others, like Cartlidge, remain somehow lost opportunities, perhaps because their career started too late or ended too early. Cartlidge was after all in her early forties when she died and thus five years older than Monroe, but she was already thirty-two when she appeared in Naked, and seven years was too short a window to become more than an actress of promise. The same could be said of Phoenix and also Ledger, as if their professional lives were cut short as Monroe’s, Dean’s and Golubeva’s were not. Almost all the lives we have been focusing on ended far too early, given the average life-span of a Western person. But imagine if for, example, Robert de Niro passed away at 54, just after making Heat and Casino, or Brando after finishing Apocalypse Now at about the same age, or even Audrey Hepburn, after Charade, no more than thirty-five? This doesn’t mean good work wasn’t done afterwards (Two For the Road is a marvellous Hepburn/Finney film) but neither would the careers have seemed foreshortened; only the life curtailed. 

    Some actors of course retire, and Hepburn went into semi-retirement in the late sixties, while Daniel Day-Lewis announced his when he turned sixty. But an actor isn’t assumed to have a career-span like a sportsperson. The point of sport is it rests in quantitative performance; acting qualitative display. An actor’s purpose isn’t to be the best actor in the world (which is partly why awards ceremonies are nonsense) but to play the character with texture, nuance and plausibility. Whether someone is eighteen or eighty, the same problem resides. Yet it seems often actors have a number of years where they occupy the persona that will define them. If George Clooney hadn’t started acting until the mid-90s and retired in 2010, that would have been enough time to secure the Clooney image, even if he’d been acting for more than a decade before the TV show ER, and has made almost a dozen films since The American. Even a star of such longevity as Clint Eastwood could have started with A Fistful of Dollars in 1964 and retired with Pale Rider in the mid-eighties and he would probably be no less a legend. This means that in many instances we might mourn a relatively youthful death but what exactly are we mourning if the star’s professional life seems complete and we never knew the person who has passed away? What we know of them is their work, and while it is understandable one might reflect on the roles Ledger or Phoenix could have gone on to play, that isn’t the same as grieving, and to fret over later roles for Marilyn Monroe or Katia Golubeva suggests a misunderstanding of their personae: that adding to their filmography may not have added anything to their perceptual status. This is the question that is of final interest, for all our preoccupations here with what might look like the personal lives and deaths of the actors we have addressed. What is the length of a creative life, and how many years does it need to offer itself as a complete one? 

© Tony McKibbin