71 Representations of suicide in cinema

In this chapter, representations of suicide in fiction film from the United States, Europe and South East Asia will be presented. Cinematic representations are helpful in addressing discourses on suicide worldwide. Typically, the sufferings of the characters that consider suicide or take their lives occupy a minor part of the plot in scenarios that highlight action, cultural and social reflection, or existential interrogations. In typical Hollywood dramas, redemption, punishment, lost love and solitude are the prime reasons for suicides; often as a consequence of genuine injustice. In the European films discussed, suicides on screen often attempt to open the screenplay to comments and reflections on the various tragic circumstances that bring the protagonists to such extremities. Refusal to recognize oneself in and by society appears to be an important reason for suicide. Another recurring theme is the wish to understand the motives behind the voluntary death of a peer. Much South East Asian cinema reflects the malaise of a society, its interiorized violence, fascination with death and the distress of a youth lacking excitement.

In the pursuit of an audience and money, the phenomenon of suicide as the ultimate form of auto-aggression has appealed to film studios worldwide over the years. Suicide contains notorious elements of marvel, being as fascinating in its preparation and spectacular in its realization as its consequences are devastating and tragic. In the United States' the Hays Code,¹ created because of demand from the big studios in the 1930s, similarly to classification committees around the world, states that suicide should be avoided on screen (alongside abortion and sex). According to the Hays Code, suicide should be avoided and discouraged as a solution to problems in the scenario, unless it is absolutely necessary for the development of the plot; and it should never be justified or glorified. Such stipulations still exist today, for example in the text elaborated by the Canadian Film Institute to justify interdictions to those under 13. The text takes into consideration that the adolescent audience today is more and more conscious of the artificiality of cinema, and that they are ‘psychologically better equipped to follow more complex films’, but they also emphasize that it is important to give depth to the characters, and to the reasons of their actions, since it is considered that adolescents are not necessarily able to face some themes without ulterior consequences. There are numerous research reports focusing on the impact of cinematographic representation, as well as images in other visual and written medias on suicidal behaviours (Michael Westerlund and colleagues discuss this topic in Chapter 69 of this book). In this chapter, however, the focus is not on the relationship between suicide rates and representations of suicide on film, rather an investigation of the representation of suicide in fiction film from the United States, Europe and South East Asia respectively. The vast majority of films depicting the suicidal process niether glorify it or present it as a solution to existential troubles. Suicide itself is rarely the subject matter of films, with some exceptions such as Virgin suicides (2000) by Sofia Coppola or Last days (2005) by Gus Van Sant, described later in this chapter. Furthermore the actual suicide is hardly ever depicted on screen: the bullet in the head of a corrupted police officer in the beginning of Cousin (1997) by Alain Corneau is one of the exceptions.

In The suicide club (1882), Robert Louis Stevenson offers a cynical portrait of a young aristocrat who wishes to set his disenchanted pleasure-seeking friends straight by offering them the luxury of committing suicide with discretion. Stevenson intended to reason with the young and disillusioned aristocrats of his day, aesthetes who avoided seeing life as anything other than agreeable farce, and to bring them back to reality. The novel was adapted into a motion picture by David Wark Griffith in 1909; in it the director largely toned down the cynicism and focused on the devastations of suicide. This film paves the way for many films to come about suicide. Griffith himself depicts suicide as a form of redemption in his 1911 film The sorrows of the unfaithful.

Suicides because of love, duty or in order to avoid dishonour all correspond perfectly with the melodramatic genre; such suicides do not lack in popular history, and no less in literature or in cinema. Redemption, punishment, lost love and solitude are the prime reasons for Hollywood suicides. Behind the romanticism, drama is to be found, and in the wake of the unrestrained, despair lures. Due to a tendency to auto-censure, the act itself is nearly never depicted in most Hollywood films. An off-screen gunshot, a panorama that turns away and as a final shot, hands that can no longer hold the gun …. The plots are constructed so that the suicidal act does not have to be seen. Don Stroud's suicide in Roger Corman's film Bloody mama (1970) is one of the few exceptions to this rule. When Frederic March throws himself into the ocean in A star is born (William Wellman 1937), he has decided to die in order to not encumber his wife Janet Gaynor's life and career: thus his suicide fades in the light of her rebirth. Kirk Douglas conceives his suicide attempt in a similar fashion in the Arrangement (Elia Kazan 1968). He throws himself from his car in front of a tractor-trailer in a tunnel, but does not forget to lower his head at the last moment. Saved, he makes for a salutary return to life. For the young and beautiful protagonist, swept up in a life of debauchery, in The picture of Dorian Gray (Albert Lewin 1945), the suicide of the affectionate young Sybil is a first warning shot. The portrait of the hero that he himself has a habit of contemplating takes on a more serious expression, and the painting slowly becomes the insufferable mirror of his dignity. Dorian even hides the painting in the attic in order to not see the hideous development of his features on the canvas as he stays eternally young. In a fit of rage, he stabs the portrait, thus provoking his own death and enabling the portrait to regain its initial features. At this juncture, suicide becomes the only possibility for Dorian Gray's redemption. However, Hollywood also grants suicide as an option for criminals to escape justice, humiliation, prison and death sentences (The parallax view, Alan Pakula, 1974). Suicide can also be a punishment that is inflicted on a conceited person, who upon recognizing her/his faults commits suicide, like the press magnate Raymond Massey in The fountainhead (King Vidor, 1949). Suicide can also be the only way out of a disappointing life with solitude as sole companion, and cinematic examples are manifold: Zero Mostel in The front (Martin Ritt, 1976), Jane Fonda in They shoot horses, don't they? (Sydney Pollack, 1969), Alan Arkin as a deaf-mute in The heart is a lonely hunter (Robert Ellis Miller, 1968), Jack Palance in The big knife (Robert Aldrich, 1955), Brad Dourif in One flew over the cuckoo's nest (Milos Forman, 1975), Vincent d'Onofrio in Full metal jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987) and in former times Greta Garbo and Vivian Leigh in different versions of Anna Karenina.

Such acts of auto-destruction can also be depicted in a more indirect form: the person wishing to commit suicide arranges for someone else to eliminate them accidentally. Correspondingly, Kirk Douglas' revolver is empty when he faces Rock Hudson at the end of The last sunset (Robert Aldrich, 1961). Similarly, Burt Lancaster refuses to get up and remains lying down in the shadowy light of a room in the face of the murderers that are out to kill him (The killers, Robert Siodmak, 1946). He awaits his punishment, jaded and fed up with running away. The men enter, weapons in hand, and fire at Lancaster who hardly sits up to see who they are as he succumbs to the heavy fire. The majority of the suicides mentioned above are presented as consequences of genuine injustice, such as poor Vincent d'Onofrio in Full metal jacket whose obesity is the object of the humiliation he suffers. In front of the dislocated, immobile, bloody body the audience realizes the enormous waste. Numerous suicide attempts are interrupted on film; Charlie Chaplin intervenes in time to save the life of his young neighbour Claire Bloom in Limelight (1952). Then there is Natalie Wood who decides to attempt suicide but forgets her initial intentions and takes a new taste to life (Daisy Clover, Robert Mulligan 1965). In fact, the big studios prefer scenes of desperation that turn into scenes of rebirth. In It's a wonderful life (Frank Capra, 1946), James Stewart cries out: ‘I want to live again, please Lord let me live again!’ Then there is Jose Ferrer, playing the part of Toulouse-Lautrec in John Huston's 1952 Moulin Rouge, who turns on the gas to kill himself, looks at one of his paintings one last time and instinctively sets out to finish it, opening a window to breathe in the fresh air of Montmartre. In fact, Hollywood also loves to treat the topic through comedy, using an optimistic approach to gain the upper hand in this situation. Bud Cort-Harold is an unrepentant suicide attempter in Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1972). In The end (1978), Burt Reynolds, director and lead actor, finds out that he has an incurable disease and ravages the hospital to find a way to end his life. In Cookie's fortune (Robert Altman, 1998), the suicide of an eccentric widow is disguised as murder by her self-righteous niece. This dramatic situation embarks us on a humorous adventure, played in an extraordinary fashion by Glenn Close. As has been shown through these examples, suicide is found in all the big genres of Hollywood cinema. David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001) perfectly sets the scene for Hollywood suicide with a plot that rests entirely on the twofoldedness of illusion and manipulation, erasing the border between right and wrong, dream and reality. Naomi Watts' suicide adds to this ambivalence.

It is only in 1985 with Mishima by Paul Schrader that US cinema modifies its stance on suicide. Mishima tells the story of the Japanese author Yukio Mishima, until he takes his life through hara-kiri in 1970. The author, whose real name is Kimitake Hiraoka, is 45 years old when he takes his life through ritual suicide by ‘seppuku’ at the Ministry of Defence. Hiraoka, author of Confessions of a mask (1949), was fascinated with death and chose to kill himself in accordance with the Japanese tradition of ritual suicide by disembowelment. Mishima commits seppuku after an unsuccessful attempt to incite the armed forces to stage a coup d'état with his private army. On the morning of his death he writes: ‘Life is short but I want to live in eternity.’ Schrader finds his inspiration in Mishima's four novels and breaks them into a very realistic narration that is far from the melodramatic cinema described above.

In 2001, The suicide club was once again adapted to the screen, this time by the director Rachel Samuels. Produced by Roger Corman, the film renews the ties with the gothic film tradition, immersed in a sober and disquieting atmosphere, evoking the irony and cynicism of Stevenson's novel. Samuels explains that when she discovered Stevenson's novel she was immediately struck by the modernity and pertinence of his ideas:

The pre-production of the film, in 1999, coincided with the beginning of the lawsuit against Doctor Kevorkian, accused of murder for having ‘helped’ around ten people to kill themselves. At the same point in time, shootings and other suicide pacts amongst high school students was a common feature in US media. The decadence and fin-de-siécle anomie that characterises Stevenson's novel were not far from the millenary atmosphere of 1999. Stevenson describes the modern era with all its comforts—railroads, the telegraph, elevators—where all is easy and practical, and then he asks himself: how come one can not chose one's own death with equal facility and comfort? Doctor Kevorkian's case brought the same questions to surface. These issues are at the core of the film.

http://www.pardo.ch/2000/program/105r.htm

In 2005, two directors addressed suicide (Gus Van Sant with Last days) and euthanasia (Clint Eastwood with Million dollar baby), with rare accuracy, thus opening the eyes of many others to these phenomena. Gus Van Sant staged the last days of the front man of Nirvana and idol of a generation, Kurt Cobain, before his suicide in 1994. By refusing a fine-spun reconstitution in order to better ‘understand’ the act or the artist, Van Sant distances himself from Hollywood's melodramatic vision, and paints a portrait of a man, a body, a silhouette that bends over progressively until it never stands up again. Van Sant offers an ethical portrait filled with affection vis-à-vis his subject, and the suicide is an on-screen event. Van Sant chooses to film the exterior of the house whilst Cobain, or Blake in the film, is in the studio, angry about a song made of samples by him; a scream is heard and its echo extends endlessly. Blake's body is seen behind a window and a naked ghost rises from his corpse slowly climbing a ladder. The ghost leaves the body: a representation of the climb to heaven and the liberation from the confined setting that imprisoned him. As opposed to Last days, Million dollar baby holds onto a melodramatic structure true to the Hollywood tradition described above, with themes as varied as love, relationships and friendships, but Clint Eastwood does not stop there. Maggie Fitzgerald (Hillary Swank), an unfortunate waitress persuades a cranky boxing instructor called Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) to help her to become a boxing champion. Thanks to her determination, Maggie reaches the top and is about to become champion of the world. Until this point the film has no unexpected develpoments, but suddenly as a result of an accident during a fight, Maggie becomes paralysed; she is incapable of any kind of movement and needs artificial respiration. Despite (or because) having all of her mental capacities intact, she sees no reason to continue living. She tries to commit suicide, and finally persuades Frankie to help her to die. ‘I had it all’ Maggie says to Frankie, ‘so don't take it away from me’. The last forty minutes of the film help us to identify with Maggies' suffering and with Frankie's tragic dilemma. Her wish to die is above all an immense cry of despair. Frankie's final decision to give her a mortal dose is also a confession of his helplessness and inability to help her to surpass her condition.

In the long filmography of European cinema there are numerous films in which suicide occurs as an element of the scenario without being the main theme. In such films, the suicides are often inspired by real life well-known events or historical personalities like the archduke Rudolf and his mistress baroness Mary Vetsera who together committed suicide at his Mayerling hunting lodge (Mayerling, Terrence Young, 1969). Other examples are Ludwig (Luchino Visconti, 1972) or Vincent van Gogh who, suffering from a mental disorder and haunted by anxiety, shoots himself in the chest only to die a few days later (Van Gogh, Maurice Pialat, 1990). Likewise, the melodramatic perspective is not unique to Hollywood cinema. Elvira Madigan by Bo Widerberg from 1967 is an excellent example. The film tells the tragic story of a lieutenant in the Swedish army, who after having been abandoned by wife and children, deserts and flees with the famous ropewalker Elvira Madigan. By leaving his former environment, in which he had difficulties letting his ambitions as a writer blossom, the officer situates himself halfway between adolescent revolt and an adult class-consciousness and chooses the deadlock of a total break with society. His happiness, fated to a state of unbearable isolation, crumbles with time. The stages of degradation described by Widerberg illustrate with lucidity the loss of substance of an individual when he is no longer a part of the collective. The protagonists' love slowly dies and is declared over with the gunshot and the still image of Elvira's half-closed hands holding onto a white butterfly. A second gunshot is heard off-screen alongside the flow of the river.

The suicide attempts of Michel Simon in Boudu saved from drowning (Jean Renoir, 1932), Djamel Debouzze's in Angel A (Luc Besson, 2006), Isa Miranda's in Everybody's woman (Max Ophuls, 1934) and Vanessa Paradis' in The girl on the bridge (Patrice Leconte, 1998), are all used as points of departure to a return to life for the distressed characters. The suicide attempts open the screenplay to comments and reflections on the various tragic circumstances that brought the protagonists to such extremities. In the German film Head on by Faith Akin (Gegen die Wand, 2004) two suicide attempts are depicted. Cahit is a young German of Turkish origin living a miserable life of excessive drinking and drug abuse. One night, he semi-intentionally crashes into a wall, and barely survives. At the hospital he meets a girl, Sibel, another German Turk who has tried to commit suicide. She asks Cahit to carry out a white marriage with her (one without sexual relations) to escape her family's suffocating pressure. Cahit finally agrees to take part in her plan. The two of them try to find their respective place in the new constellation. Whilst Sibel enjoys her newfound freedom, Cahit realizes that he is falling for this young woman who has brought order, happiness and hope into his life. The catastrophe is irrefutable and the two find themselves in the midst of a storm of emotions and violence.

Another recurring approach to suicide is the inquiry following the voluntary death of another person; the wish to understand the motives of such a tragic decision. In Terminale (Francis Girod, 1998), the happy-go-lucky life of a group of Parisian high-school students ends when one of them kills herself. Accordingly, her friends try to understand why Caroline threw herself out of the window in the middle of a philosophy lesson. At the age of 30, Anna, the female protagonist in the Dutch film Guernsey (Nanouk Leopold 2005), is married and a mother of three. She lives in the suburbs of a large city and she works with irrigation systems. At the time of one of her visits abroad, she discovers the corpse of one of her colleagues who has killed herself. Nobody seems to know the reasons for the suicide. Distressed, Anna realises that even those we hold close remain strangers to us. Her outlook on her family changes and she starts to question what she means to them. Similarly, in The passenger (Eric Caravaca, 2004), Thomas finds out about his long since forgotten brother's suicide. He identifies the body at the forensic institute in Marseille. The casket has to be repatriated to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer but Thomas refuses to sign the burial demand. He wants a few days to understand the reasons for his brother hanging himself and decides to go there by car. Thomas moves in to his brother's old home at the port and gets to know his old companion and his nephew Lucas, but does not tell them about his brother's suicide. In losing his brother, Thomas changes his outlook on life and learns that he never played a part in the memory of the one he wants to remember.

For the director Philippe Garrel, the suicide attempt is an intimate and autobiographic subject, introduced in both Elle a passé tant d'heures sous les sunlights… (1984) and Night wind (Le vent de la nuit, 1998). In the first film, there is still hope when Garrel himself hesitates in front of an open window, only to finally abandon the thought of suicide, thinking about his child and symbolically addressing himself to an entire generation: ‘I don't think about suicide anymore, life is long you know, I have to continue.’ However, in the second film, which is about ageing, the darkness is absolute, and the hero Serge is always ready to go, with his arm of ‘delivery’ constantly at hand. Hélène, an older disillusioned woman, cuts her veins in public. Refusing to recognize oneself in and by society thus appears to be an important reason for suicide. Some film-makers will however encourage further reflection giving their characters' suicides social and political significance. Agnès Varda gives a cynical humorous touch to the cliché of happiness in her film Happiness (Le bonheur) from 1965. In the film, a television personality says that happiness is found ‘through submission to man’. Thérèse finds out that her husband has a mistress. Whilst the latter declares that two women mean two times the fun without hurting either one of them, Thérèse refuses this submission and kills herself. The end is perfectly immoral: the husband marries his mistress who now becomes his companion at home, at the table and in bed. All the more reckless is Robert Bresson's Mouchette from 1967, in which a heroine in despair confronts the cruel stupidities of adults, the suffering of her mother, the bestial desire that ends all innocence and the rage of a society that humiliates childhood. Valerian Borowczyk uses a convent for the symbolic representation of the Polish totalitarian system in Behind convent walls (Intérieur d'un couvent, 1977), based on a novel by Stendahl. The abbess wishes to impose a constrained set of rules on the sisters, but she does not succeed in getting all of them to respect her. Her stubbornness drives two sisters to madness and suicide, but the abbess finally dies as well. Borowczyk addresses a cynical response to those in rule: all systems imposed through force are doomed to vanish. Ken Loach describes men and women who struggle to keep their self-respect in a society full of social violence, crystallised in the working conditions and life of unemployment that he illustrates. In the dilapidated Glasgow of My name is Joe (1998), Peter Mullan is an unemployed former alcoholic who tries to save his friend Liam, a drug-addict sucked into the destructive spiral of misery, drugs, theft and low-paid jobs. One night Liam desperately seeks his friend, submerged by guilt for having double-crossed him and unable to follow his advice, he hangs himself by throwing himself out the window. The scene is tragic. Joe hangs over the lifeless body that dangles along the wall of the building whilst crying and screaming out his hatred towards an insensitive society that eliminates the weak with extraordinary brutality. Is suicide the only response to the inhuman rigidity of such a venture?

Wished for and planned death on film has often incited fervent debates. When the British filmmaker Michael Powell made Peeping Tom in 1960, the subject provoked a wide range of reactions. Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), a young film-maker who is haunted by an intuitive fear, shut away in a morbid solitude, lures women to his studio and films the fear of his victims as they realise their impending death. An amazing film to some, whilst others consider it a clinical case of a pathologist, Peeping Tom analyses voyeurism by placing the viewer in the very uncomfortable position as film-maker, victim and camera simultaneously. Lewis is finally exposed by his neighbour and the police, and subsequently, kills himself in a scene of great horror. Through the meticulous mise-en-scène of his own death, the viewer involuntarily assists in the making of the film. At this point of the film, Powell intelligently abandons the subjective camera, removing from Lewis the role as ‘director’ of his own death. The lapse between what is filmed with Lewis' camera and what Powell shows the viewer marks a distance between the protagonist and an ensuing de-dramatization. In fact, Powell refuses to show the suicide through the device installed by Lewis. The latter will not be able to see his proper death and the angle chosen by Powell is that of a spectator situated close by. The immediate consequences of the suicide are off-screen: what remains to be shown is the blood on the foot of the camera and the wall, the suffering and the spasms, the corpse, the horror and the impression of yet another dreadful waste.

Incurable illness and traumatizing accidents may be the cause of depression and reflections on life and death. In The sea within (Alejandro Amenábar, Mar adentro, 2004), Ramón (Javier Bardem) cannot move his head because of an accident in his youth. For almost thirty years he is bedridden and unhappy, his only opening to the world is the window in his room through which he can see the sea. Although family surrounds him, Ramón has but one wish: to decide over his own death and to end his life with dignity. Inspired by the true story of Ramón Sampedro, who featured regularly in the media in Spain; the film echoes back his struggle to receive the right to die with dignity. He ended his life on 12 January 1998 without accusing those who helped him. Amenabar explains that upon realizing what an admirable man Sampedro was he decided to make the film. He concentrated on the last months of his life, and the film celebrates life itself whilst addressing euthanasia and assisted suicide in a frank manner. Tackling such a delicate subject, Amenabar felt obliged to take a position:

Assisted suicide is a delicate subject that has to be treated with care in order to not encourage people to kill themselves or others. As a director, I tried to be respectful towards handicapped and sick people. At the same time I had to respect what had happened. If I had been in Ramón's position, I would not have wanted to die, but I think that he was right in saying that his life belonged to him and that he could do what he wanted with it. This is why I think assisted suicide should be permitted.

The actor, Javier Bardem, follows the same line of reasoning:

I think that as long as the people who are suffering are conscious, like Ramón Sampedro, and that it is not a question of an impulsive act or connected to depression, I support their choices all the way. If someone in my family in such a position would ask me, I would try to help that person, even if it would break my heart. Actually, I think that it would be as cruel to force a person with such an illness to die as it would be to force someone like Ramón to live. Everyone should be in charge of their own lives as they wish, and if someone is not capable of doing something like this on his/her own, we should have the right to help out. For me, it is the ultimate act of love.

Without ever flirting with morbid melodrama, Amenabar conveys Ramón's moral dilemmas in a poetic and humorous way, consequently opening the doors to societal debate. Through his meticulous film-making, he succeeds in incorporating all the questions that this predicament provokes. By asking his actors to improvise with the text as a starting point, thus animating the reactions they had following the interviews with the Sampedro family, Amenabar succeeds in multiplying the points of views surrounding the subject. Consequently, even if the director and protagonist take a stance for assisted suicide, the method they undertook in the making of the film prevented any clear-cut definitions or answers to the dilemma.

Whilst Stevenson's Suicide club from 1882 was written with a certain sense of irony, The complete manual of suicide (1993) is a serious work in which the Japanese author, Wataru Tsurumi, describes in detail ten ways to commit suicide. He argues that there is no religion or law in Japan that is opposed to suicide, and that collective suicide has always been a part of Japanese culture. In explaining the increase in suicides in Japan this morbid bestseller, along with numerous websites and chat rooms, has often been criticised by public institutions as the source of, in particular, collective suicides. Suicide, along with luxury or eroticism, is taboo in the West, or in countries with a Christian tradition, but this is not the case in Japan. Japanese directors of the 1960s and 1970s like Yasuzo Masumura or Nagisa Oshima (as well as the author Yukio Mishima who orchestrated his own death), treat suicide in a manner which often mixes eroticism and suicide. Mishima made a short film called Yukoku in 1965, describing in detail the suicide of a soldier who feels dishonoured because he did not assist in the coup d'état in 1936. Malleable aestheticism erupting from ritual suicide (Mishima) and unprudish sex and flirting with death (Masumura, Oshima) were means to provoke scandals and to renounce the immobility of social classes. Blind beast (Masumura 1969) and The realm of the senses (Oshima 1976) both describe, in different ways, absolute passion; two lovers consider that the climax of love is to put an end to life together. In Japan, erotic death or sacrifice is an accepted means to settle some sort of conflict. When a situation is inextricable and harmony is disturbed, one way to bring back order is by eliminating the object of discord, which sometimes happens to be oneself. Suicide is merely one way of dying and the soul continues to live in the cycle of deaths and rebirths. However, in the light of the high number of suicides among particularly young people, Japanese directors have confronted the problem at stake by trying to provoke the public. Their approach, often influenced by ‘gore’,² sometimes appears more spectacular than it is pedagogical: Marebito was shot with a digital camera in a couple of days by Takashi Shimizu and is a nightmaresque scorching experience of absolute horror. Masuoka, the protagonist, a film enthusiast who films everything around him, films the suicide of an old man in the subway with an awestruck gaze. Profoundly traumatised, he withdraws, camera at hand, into the Tokyo subway in search for that ultimate fear that will propel him into insanity.

In Jisatsu Circle (Sono Shion, 2002) a collective suicide of fifty-four female high school students early on set the tone of the film. The metro is unable to stop because of the quantity of blood of the joint suicide. In the wake of the horror, genuine reflection on the suicides is to be found through the inquiry of a police inspector. At first, reasons for the suicides seem obscure: the harmful effects of a pop group, the Internet, Japanese society … and then the tragedy triggers an epidemic of collective and individual suicides with no antecedent. When twenty-something high school students throw themselves off the roof of their school, the inspector changes the focus onto the moment of the group decision: What drives these adolescents to the decision to jump at the same time? As far as he is concerned someone must be pulling the strings and manipulating these premature yet unaware youths. The policeman notices the curious appeal a girl's band of 13-year-olds hold on his daughter and he digs deeper into the meaning of one of their choruses, ‘Mail me’. Pursuing his inquiry he discovers an Internet site that incites adolescents to kill themselves. Sono Shion's film goes well beyond conventions, it is violent but it also denunciates the rigidity of Japanese society. He doesn't hesitate to show the foolishness of an act with such tragic and irreversible consequences. The Jisatsu manual (2003) by Osamu Fukutani is not as subtle as the Jisatsu Circle. The film can be situated at the crossroad of harmful opportunism and genuine work of a surrealist film. Fukutani's ambiguous approach, equally cautionary and condemning, does not propose any tangible moral and does not take a stand in relation to this plague of twenty-first century Japan. The hero of the film, Yu, is a young journalist, who on his boss's orders leads an inquiry on collective suicide. Through these sinister acts, Yu tries to break the mystery of suicide as a whole: what drives someone to end their life? His investigation leads him to Ricky, a young mysterious woman who in various chat rooms with suicide as focus, provides the most ‘motivated’ with a dvd called the ‘Jisatsu Manual’ (Suicide Manual). In the dvd she incites the spectators to commit suicide, introducing them to different ways of killing themselves. Yu becomes obsessed with the film, which brings about despair tainted with a sometimes baroque touch. Is he also the prey of the ‘spirit of suicide’? The film offers an interesting basis of discussion about the morbid influences that may lead to suicide, but the systematic stigmatization of the video and the Internet, as well as the over-simplification of the characters, detracts from its worth. However, the nightmarish ending, in which Yu relinquishes the wish to understand for the wish to die, gives a stifling impression of an inescapable and tragic destiny. A great popular success, Yuichi Onuma made a follow-up to the Jisatsu manual, the tedious The manual 2 intermediate level.

The analysis of contemporary Japan is at its best in Bashing by Masahiro Kobayashi (2005). Kobayashi tells the story of the sad return of Yuko, former hostage in Iraq. The story is inspired by a real event. Her imprisonment and the publicity that came with it greatly humiliated the authorities and disgraced her family. Her father, forced to quit his work, sees no other way out than suicide. Public opinion, however, thinks that she should have died instead. As the title suggests, Yuko is harassed, showered with phone calls, insulted in the street, fired. Yuko is a foreigner in her own land. Profoundly upset by her father's suicide but refusing to follow his path, she decides to return to Iraq; a desperate yet determined reaction to the social and human rejection that she is victim of.

South Korean cinema also shows proof of a similar obsession with suicide, especially those of adolescents. Memento mori by Kim Tae-Yong and Min Kyu-Dong (Yeogo goedam II, 1999) is an excellent example. In a South-Korean secondary school for girls, Min-ah discovers the diary that two of her schoolmates write together. As she is reading the diary she experiences strange hallucinations. Later at the nurse's office, she is witness to an intimate embrace between the writers of the journal, Hyo-Shin and her girlfriend Shi-Eun. A few days later when the girls are getting ready for their annual health examination, Hyo-Shin throws herself out the window. Contrary to what one might think, Shi-Eun does not seem to be affected by her death and appears indifferent in the days that follow. From this moment on, strange phenomenon that will change Min-ah's life ensue. Hyo-Shin's suicide, the ghost that haunts the school hallways and a next to adult-free closed environment establish the scenery of the film. The virgin suicides and Battle royale (Kinju Fukusaku 2001) come to mind, but the two young directors manage to convey a personal style, primarily thanks to the disconcerting mix of genres and the fragmented and original narrative style. The captivating and effective montage helps the spectator penetrate the two inseparable girls' thoughts; whose bickering provokes quite a lot of laughter. Behind the comedic appearance drama is hidden a love story that leads to suicide.

Memento mori, alongside films by directors such as Park Chan-Wook and Kim Ki-Duk, as well as Kim Jee-Woon and Hong Sang-Soo, are part of a current in Korean cinema with focus on obsessions with death: a kind of death that fascinates adolescents and young adults to such an extreme that it exercises a power of destructive attraction on them. Suicide is for them an act of defiance, an enticement, an almost child-like game, a sort of performance to imitate idols such as Kurt Cobain. This cinema reflects the malaise of a society, its interiorized violence and the distress of youth lacking excitement. Suicide designer (Jeon Soo-II 2003) is a brilliant yet disturbing example of such cinema. In the first shot, the camera intriguingly moves forward in a dark hallway, the silhouette of first a man, and then a woman appears. Sounds of footsteps in water and eerie drumming create an oppressive atmosphere. The camera keeps on moving forward slowly, almost in slow motion, suddenly the camera makes a quarter of a turn towards a staircase. At the top of a menacing stone monument immobile spectators wait for a performance to begin. A white sheet is lifted, stained and dripping with blood. A woman with long black hair, trembling with fear and smudged with blood is attached to a rope. A ghastly melody accompanies the scene. It is in fact nothing but a performance in which a woman simulates her own suicide. Then another evasive character appears, Sung, writer, art and jazz enthusiast with an obscure line of work: suicide designer. ‘There are two ways of becoming God: by writing, or by directing people towards their death. I help people to die’, he explains with unabashed cynicism. Desperate people contact him over the Internet, and he then sketches out and carries out their suicide according to their wishes. He considers his job as a work of art and provides such ambiguous motivations for his vocation as a writer's exultation, existential megalomania and lucrative business. Once again Stevenson's Suicide club comes to mind. Not unlike the Japanese films Jisatsu Circle and the Jisatsu manual, the red line of the scenario is an inquiry. A video-artist and his brother who is a taxi driver meet a naive young nymphomaniac and have sex with her. Stunned by her suicide, the two men independently decide to understand the causes of her suicide and find out about Sung. The ambience is grisly and dark and reality is mixed with abstruse and tragic fantasy: Is being alive nothing but a question of perception? In Tale of cinema by Hong Sang-Soo from 2005, the unease of Korean youth is once again portrayed through the temptation of suicide. The Thai film Nothing to lose (Danny Pang 2002) also depicts two young people who want to commit suicide. Somchai, a chronic gambler who has lost everything, and Gogo, a disillusioned girl, happen to attempt their respective suicides on the same rooftop. Somchai is overtaken by his wish to live and endeavours to convince Gogo not to jump. Discovering their respective stories, they decide to use the willpower they had to kill themselves to take revenge on life and the people that made it unliveable for them. From there on, they get out on the road, much like Bonnie and Clyde or Thelma and Louise, with nothing to lose, scorning death.

To conclude, one example of Middle Eastern cinema will be mentioned, the interesting and profound film by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, A taste of cherry. In the film, that won the Palm d'Or at Cannes in 1997, Kiarostami envisions suicide as the only option to the hellish life on earth and the stagnated future of an Iran devoured by fundamentalism. Still, the film remains unrelentingly optimistic and humanistic despite its pessimist outcome. The scenario is simple: Mr Badli drives around the surroundings of Teheran in search for a person who, in exchange for remuneration, would be willing to help him to end his life. The protagonists' motivations are never explained, but the discussions with the different characters he meets confront him over again with one essential question: Why not try to live?

Representations of adolescent suffering and suicide often appear all the more tragic and incomprehensible. Film-makers worldwide prove fascination for the theme, as it is of great concern to us all. Explanations are often sought in existing socio-economic and cultural contexts. In this fashion, Roberto Rossellini explores suicide in two of his films, Germany year zero (Germania anno zero, 1948) and The greatest love (Europa'51, 1952). An abandoned child, criminal by mistake, finds no place of reassurance and roams the street of a war-ravaged Berlin. He finds a demolished building from which he throws himself in a scene of dreadful violence. The camera does not move and observes the boy from a respectable distance. His feet move toward the emptiness, stays immobile for a second before the boy brutally lets himself fall. The camera follows his descent. A new shot fixates the little lifeless body, as lonely as before the fall. In a parallel shot, the child is seen calling for help, trying to get in touch with his mother who is too busy, trying to reconnect with the past. On screen, he does not die immediately after his fall; his mother has the time to realize how she has forsaken her own son. After her son's death, the mother's intense guilt spurs her to change direction in life to the great displeasure of her husband. With these two films, Rossellini provokes reflection on the causes of child suicides by calling to mind the responsibilities of society and the family, refusing to see the distress and existential anxiety of children facing a past too present and a worrisome future. Taking the leap to more contemporary cinema, Tom Moore, in his 1986 masterpiece, Good night, mother tackles the problem of adolescent suicide. Sissy Spacek informs her mother, Anne Bancroft, of her intention to kill herself with the same gun her father used to kill himself. She commits suicide despite her mother's desperate interference. At last the mother is forced to admit her daughter's right over her own soul and life. Four years later with Dead poets' society by Peter Weir, the director points to the responsibility of the family, and the father in particular, at the time of the son's suicide.

In recent years, The virgin suicides (Sofia Coppola 2000) and Ken Park (Larry Clark 2004) have both opened the door to interesting discussion concerning adolescent suicide. The off-screen narration told in a melancholic voice by a narrator/witness, immediately establishes Sofia Coppola's 2000 film, The virgin suicides as a chronic of suicide. ‘Cecilia was the first one to go’ the off-screen voice tells us, thus foretelling us the tragic end of the five Lisbon sisters and inscribing the events to come in an inescapable progression towards death. The Lisbon sisters live in an affluent North-American suburb at the end of the 1970s, together forming a homogenous and undifferentiated whole: transparent creatures that form one body of which the dominant trait is their blondness. Their unity is confirmed by recurring circular figures throughout the film. When the youngest sister ends her life at a party given in her honour, the mother (Kathleen Turner), paragon of virtue who suffocates her offspring through puritan education, collects her daughters around her to stop them from contemplating the horror scene. Her arms encircle and surround the adolescents who seem to be more or less compliant with her rigid rearing techniques. Whenever a member of the group drifts away from the community she is in danger. At the surprise party, Cecilia asks her strict mother if she can go to her room: the camera isolates her while she slowly climbs the staircase in a white virginal dress. Shortly thereafter she kills herself. The symbolic break of the circle represents the disintegration of the family and by extension of society. Lux, another one of the sisters, wakes up alone in the morning on the football field, abandoned by her lover after their first night of love-making; her body is white, fragile and she is untidy, lost in the enormous grass-field. The catastrophe is imminent and the process of death underway. The Lisbon sisters no longer have the strength to survive or to run away, they are let down and disgusted by their own existence over which they hold no control. They no longer want to suffer and decide to escape through suicide. They plan their death as a cinematographic scenario that will unveil their suffering to the world. The virgin suicides is not a suicide apologetic, but a critique of the social rigidity of an era. The collective suicide of the four remaining Lisbon sisters contributes to the resurfacing of the hypocrisy and conformism of a social class that seems to be living on borrowed time. The sisters' disappearance will forever stay with the boys of the neighbourhood and change their lives, but the tragedy does not seem to affect the community as a whole, which continues with its everyday life. The death of the young girls does not influence the egoistic and materialistic society around them as a means of possible spiritual regeneration. In response to the suicide of their daughters, the social suicide of their parents is set in motion; beginning with the dismissal of their father, a high school teacher.

Ken Park, a teenage redhead, prepares his backpack and gets ready for school. He leaves his house and goes to a skate park. He then puts his camera in front of him, turns it on, takes out a gun and shoots himself in the head. With this scene, Larry Clark opens his film, Ken Park, from 2004. With Ken Park, Larry Clark continues in the same vein as the collective suicide of the blonde heroines in Sofia Coppola's film: an extreme act that is generated by suffocating puritanism. The ghost of the adolescent follows the spectator for the rest of the film, which shows us the ravaged lives of various teenagers left to themselves in a North-American suburb. Ken Park depicts teenagers who grow up and who survive; at whatever costs their family or society around them have to pay. Ken Park's dazzling and violent suicide influences and pervades the collective unconscious of a group of teenagers in a dormant little town in California. The teenagers in the film try to balance their way through the transitory age of adolescence. They find transitory release of distress and show resistance through unrestrained sexuality. When a father of one of the protagonists, in an act of fury, breaks his son's skateboard and prime sign of identity, the tone is given. Ken Park is a narrative of adolescents broken by the depravation of their parents and sacrificed in the course of the collapse of the family.

With Kamataki Claude Gagnon received a handful of prices at the Festival de Montréal in 2005. In the film, the Quebecois film-maker proposes a serene look on a ‘return to life’. After the death of his father and a subsequent suicide attempt, the young Ken Antoine is sent to his Japanese uncle Takuma, brother of his father. Takuma is a renowned ceramicist who makes kamataki, unvarnished pottery. The cultural and generational differences are enormous between the young, confused and disillusioned Ken from Montreal and his uncle, a wise man, famous artist and practicing Buddhist in the Japanese countryside. Ken is juxtaposed into an unknown universe, exotic yet disturbing at the same time. Beauty, ugliness, sweat, sex and his uncle trouble and bustle the still fragile young man. Without noticing, Ken discovers beauty where he least expects it and takes up contact with life again. Just like he knows how to give birth to, feed and look after the intense fire of his oven, Takuma will also know how to reignite Ken's flame.

Passing from the rather conventional, often romantic, yet rarely realistic Hollywood cinema, to the intense and pessimistic imagery of suicide in a lot of European film, to the raw outlook reflecting a societal interrogation common in Asian movies, suicide on screen is above all a dramatic, painful and violent element of unforeseen or anticipated nature. A small number of films lead to genuine reflection on this tragedy that touches a great number of teenagers worldwide. Although the majority of feature films, of which a revealing yet limited selection have been introduced in this chapter, do not encourage suicide, very few sincerely examine the path that leads to the so-called passing to the act. Suicide in cinema takes an abridged form. Depression as a possible cause of suicide is scarcely in focus on screen. The sufferings of the characters who consider suicide or take their lives occupy but a minor part of the plot in scenarios that highlight action (Hollywood), cultural and social reflection (Japan and Korea), and finally an existential interrogation that borders on the too abstract (Europe). Suicide merely depicted as a heroic act or as a failure effectively trivialises the act, and may lead to teenagers concluding that ending one's life is an acceptable death. The virgin suicides entails serious reflection on the slow progression towards suicide that each one of the girls face, yet the film suggests suicide as the only solution to their sufferings. Behind this decision, the solitude and impossibility to confide lure and yet again become the triggering factors of suicide on screen. In no way is fiction film an instrument of therapy.