Film review—

Flight from Death: the Quest for Immortality.

Transcendental Media, 2002 (90 minute VCR, www.flightfromdeath.com, e-mail info@flightfromdeath.com).

Reviewed by James W. Green,

The title tells it all. This is a video driven by a singular and compelling idea: human activity and achievements are ultimately derived from a pervasive death denying anxiety, the fearful consequence of our standing as nature's only thinking, contemplative primate. A lyrical, visually lush film, it is a photographic retelling of anthropologist Ernest Becker's Denial of Death, his Pulitzer Prize winning book of 1973.

As self-conscious beings we live, says Becker, a terrible paradox. Our "deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive" (p. 66). We shrink by creating elaborate structures of belief and action — cultures — to assure ourselves that transcendent realities exist and, further, that they guarantee our individual and collective immortality. Whoever or whatever challenges us on those counts, any who doubt and especially those of competing faiths, we feel impelled to destroy in order to preserve the integrity or our own vision and hopes. We "deny" our mortality through heroic deeds valorized by our culture and, when confronted by others who do not share our vision, we act to control or destroy them to "prove" we were right after all.

This is a large, dramatic theory and Flight from Death explores it along two parallel paths, one that simply assumes the truth of Becker's position and provides a variety of examples from places as diverse as Guyana and Greece and one that looks at current scientific efforts to test the idea and determine its validity.

On the first path, we are shown some of the imaginative ways humans have dealt with the "problem of death" or, more accurately, the problem of their anxiety about it. In a fluid and beautifully composed flow of images, we are taken to cemeteries, sites of religious art and rituals, the beguiling distractions of America's corporate, consumer culture, and the horrors of contemporary street violence, political rebellion, and the Twin Towers on 9/11. When the literal world fails us, as it often does, we activate our symbols, be they crucifixes or the murderous gods of ethnic cleansing, to convince ourselves that our visions of transcendence are real and we have earned a favored place in them.

The video's second path, conceptually more interesting, summarizes the work of a number of experimental social psychologists and related researchers including Sheldon Solomon, Dan Liechty, Merlyn Mowrey, Jeff Greenberg, Robert Jay Lifton and Neil Elgee. They want to know if we really are less tolerant of others and more inclined to do them damage when we are made mindful of our individual mortality. The idea is that the presence of others who do not share our views, merely a curiosity most of the time, becomes a threat when we are anxious about our own security or the truth of our culture's prescriptions for death avoidance. They test this hypothesis in a number of settings using experimental and control groups, the gold standard of much (but not all) social science, to demonstrate that Becker probably had it right.

Did he? You will have to view their experiments yourself and decide if they prove that death denial really is a universal human trait, one responsible for virtually all our species has accomplished through the agency of symbolic imagination and culture construction. If true, the experimental psychologists have neatly addressed the issue as Freud and Becker would have it. But at the same time, I can imagine Marx fussing and fuming in his digs (so to speak) in northwest London's Highgate Cemetery. Is human behavior driven largely, even solely, by ideas, especially ideas about mortality? Yes, the Palestinians and Israelis do indeed have different visions of cosmic purpose but don't land and labor and economic self-sufficiency have something to do with their fratricidal struggle? Do not long colonial histories and continued resource extraction have something to do with the rage of Taliban fanatics and the Bin Ladens of the world, and anti-apartheid South Africans and freedom seeking East Timorese as well?

The advocates of Becker's denial of death hypothesis have done an impressive job on cross-cultural ideologies of life, death and beliefs about immortality. But given the physical beings we are, dependent on an ecosystem our own actions put at peril daily, they need to find a place for land, food, water and scarce resources in Becker's theory of culture before it can be called a comprehensive explanation. But that is for a future film.

I like Flight from Death and for two good reasons. First, it will appeal to many audiences and I intend to use it in my university classes for the discussion it will surely generate. It is provocative and an exquisite viewing experience, a pleasure (an odd thing to say about death) to watch. The producers, director, and camera people (one of them memorialized in connection with 9/11 in a moving scene at the end) are to be congratulated. Second, the final sequence is exactly right, a short collage of people young and old at play, being the unselfconscious, trusting, world-engaging primates Mother Nature intended us to be, at least for part of our allotted time.

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