It should feel ridiculous. People howling Shakespeare at the Pacific wind inside concrete walls built to kill other people, it’s the kind of high-concept art project that makes regular humans roll their eyes so hard they can see their own brain stems.
But it doesn’t feel ridiculous. It feels necessary.
Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over… Death is not anything… death is not… It’s the absence of presence, nothing more… the endless time of never coming back… a gap you can’t see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes not sound…
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Stoppard is right and he is also full of shit. Death isn’t romantic, sure, anyone who’s actually sat with it knows that. It smells wrong. It’s banal and bureaucratic and it takes forever and then it’s over in a second that you missed while you were checking your phone. But death is also the only thing that matters, the only thing that’s ever mattered, the period at the end of every sentence we’re all pretending isn’t coming.
And here’s Ava and John in the ruins of American empire, in this monument to death we built and then abandoned, performing the oldest con game in the world: pretending to die so that we can practice watching, so we can rehearse the grief before the real show starts.
Shakespeare knew. The old bastard knew that the only reason we pack into dark rooms to watch people suffer is because we’re terrified it’s going to happen to us. And it is. It absolutely is. Count on it. The wind blowing through Battery Wallace doesn’t give a shit about your bank account, your zip code, or even whether you really “got” the subtext. It just blows.
This contact sheet, those fractured moments of performed mortality, they’re not capturing death.
They’re capturing four people in the Marin Headlands trying to make sense of absence, trying to find a shape for the hole, trying to convince ourselves that if we can see it clearly enough, name it precisely enough, frame it just right, maybe it won’t hurt so fucking much when it’s real.
It will, though. It always does.