Five Great Onscreen Deaths That Stayed With Me

EDIT 12/13/2006: I realized that half of my Great Escape Commentary got cut off so that has been remedied. Reread it if you want a Merry Christmas otherwise you will have bad luck for seven years.

Movies were important to me growing up. Aside from family movie nights when we would all get together to watch something we rented from the local rental store, my father had a passion for watching old movies on TV. On Sundays after church and before the Packer game my father, my brother, and I would watch the best movies we could find on TV. A lot of these movies remain my favorites to this day. Some of the most significant moments that I can remember from these movies are death scenes. Watching a character die can be very significant for an adolescent. What follows is a collection of death scenes I saw as a child/youth/nubile/young adult/teenager/wait did I just call myself a nubile that still seem important to me today.

Hans Gruber in Die Hard

While I wasn’t strictly a kid when I saw this movie, I was young (I think 13) and to this day it remains the perfect action movie in my eyes and everyone else who is not f****** ignorant. The fight scenes in this movie are incredible, especially the fight with Karl. I wish I could throw a punch that looked anything like Bruce Willis’s punches in that scene. It’s the final showdown with the head terrorist that stands out to me though. John McClane is beaten, bloodied, and broken down. He has only two bullets left to take on the main villain (who is holding his wife at gunpoint) and two of his lackeys. When he finally wins it is the end of the longest night of anyone’s life. And all you can do is grin and say “f*** yeah” for him, because you finally got to see him overcome the odds and get a break. And you just watched him shoot a guy in the chest, another in the head, and then let the first guy fall off the 30^th floor of a skyscraper.

If you love Die Hard enough to comment on this I promise I will high five you next time we meet because Die Hard is awesome.

“Is there a movie I don’t die in? Dogma. Well, I end up in heaven in Dogma. Man, this is hard.”

Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: A New Hope

I tried making this list without including this one, but it just seemed superficial. It’s unfair to discredit the emotional impact of the first time you watched the original trilogy just because of [note: see everything written about Episode 1-3 or George Lucas in the past five years]. They could easily be considered (and widely are) the most important movies for my generation. A large number of people my generation are degenerate burnouts and they would be unable to tell you how to diagram a sentence. But they could all tell you what substance Han Solo was frozen in. (Correct Answer: Who gives a s***.)

The first movie obviously struck a chord and started the mania. The special effects were incredible. The acting was mediocre. The plot was derivative of old samurai movies. The only thing that mattered to us was seeing the Empire stopped. Luke and gang raid the Death Star and save the Princess, but along the way, Luke loses his sage. He watches as Darth Vader strikes down Obi-Wan with his lightsaber. The only person he really had left after the death of his Aunt and Uncle. And we lost him too. We had to learn to keep going and never stop fighting, because the fight wasn’t over yet. But he was never really gone. He would be there to watch over our shoulder in our time of need, his words echoing in our ears, telling us to trust ourselves, and later he would be there to tell us the hot chick who kissed us was our sister. None of this mattered in that one instant however because we could do nothing but watch him be destroyed by the man who would embody everything evil. That one moment left us feeling helpless, ineffective, and alone. If you threw in impotent and drunk it would be just like prom night. *Wootingi.

“I was knighted. Ewan MacGregor starred in The Island. See the difference?”

Big X (and others) in The Great Escape

War movies can be difficult to watch because of the real emotions portrayed by the actors and actresses, especially if they are based on true stories. They give us a sense of perspective but also force us to confront some of the ugly realities of the world around us. The Great Escape is not the first World War II movie I saw, nor is it my favorite World War II movie. But I do distinctly remember the ending of the movie as the first time I truly understood what World War II movies are about. They are about not forgetting. And I find it tragically ironic that the kind of hipster jag that would roll his eyes while receiving this message is the same kind of person that would call his roommate a Nazi for not sharing his peanut butter.

The Great Escape is not necessarily an action movie, but I don’t know how else to categorize it. It is about prisoners of war doing all they can to try to escape from a prison designed to prevent escapes. They do this not because they have a desperate desire to be on the other side of the barbed wire. They do this because it is their duty to force the enemy to devote a disproportionate amount of resources to keeping them prisoner. They do this because it is their duty to be involved in the war effort against the greatest evil the world has known. At the end a large group of the escaped prisoners are captured by the S.S. and instead of being returned to the prison, they are gunned down in a field. The individual characters that are shot are not my favorite characters in the movie. This is because a) Steve McQueen is in the movie, and b) the individual characters are unimportant at this point. What makes this scene so memorable to me is that it was the first time I realized that not all endings are happy endings and most heroes don’t get to come home to a parade.

"We just have to get under the fence, through the woods, past the army of cloned dinosaurs, and then we’re free.”

Liberty Valance in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

My father will never read this blog. It’s not that he hates it or is ashamed of his sons or anything we do, although my brother and I (mostly Luke) have certainly given him reason to be. Regardless, he will not see this list and will not know how much influence he has had over it. My father would not let this list exist without the inclusion of Liberty Valance. It is his favorite movie of all time and my father is cooler than your father. My dad met Lee Majors.

Here’s three reasons why the movie is great: John Wayne, Lee Marvin, and Jimmy Stewart. I have to admit that watching Jimmy Stewart shoot someone seems weird for a child who grew up in the It’s A Wonderful Life nonstop Christmas Season era. But this might be Jimmy Stewart as he is supposed to be: the everyman character with integrity that you can believe in. Lee Marvin is doing what he is supposed to as well: the scumbag character that you can hate. He is big, tough, and dirty. No one has had the courage to stand up to him. Jimmy Stewart finally does, and in the ensuing gunfight the impossible happens. This isn’t David vs. Goliath. It’s a bunny rabbit (not Harvey) vs. a wolf. Jimmy Stewart could barely hold a gun, never mind use one to outdraw Lee Marvin. But Liberty Valance goes down and the town is saved. It’s not actually that simple, but the whole point of the movie is that maybe it should be because everyone needs a hero. And sometimes the idea of Jimmy Stewart shooting Lee Marvin is more important than the fact that Lee Marvin is dead.

“You really think Mr. Smith could’ve killed me?”

Tommy J in My Girl

I am a woman. I have to be. How else can I explain the fact that I cried during this movie? This is the last movie I ever cried at. And then I watched football. You guys want to talk about power tools?

The movie wasn’t that complicated. Macaulay Culkin just played a normal, nerdy kid who was devoted to his friend and dreamed of romance. So when she looses her mood ring in the woods he goes to get it for her and ends up getting stung by bees. This kills him because he was allergic. On paper, that seems kind of like a stupid move and it could’ve easily been avoided, but when I was watching all I could feel was sadness. I think this was because I felt cheated when the kid died and missed out on everything just when things with the girl were progressing and this didn’t seem fair. Also possibly because I was ten years old and was stupid. It still felt like the kid next door dying for no reason, but life sometimes doesn’t give you reasons to understand things. This movie still stands out to me as being one of the saddest of all time. I had just cried at the Home Alone kid getting killed by bees and I wasn’t going to forget that soon.

“The last endearing thing I ever did.”

So these five deaths struck me as being important in some way. The death of a character can be a tricky thing for a filmmaker. It will often be the thing most remembered about the film. If done correctly, it will resonate and strike a chord with everyone who sees it. If done poorly, it can ruin everything else that the movie had accomplished. It’s just like the end of The Crying Game when the woman turns out to be a man. That actually had nothing to do with what I was saying but I just ruined the movie for anyone who hadn’t seen it yet so points for me.