The present is a thing
I was wondering if the 1st of January was the right day to watch “Lucky”, as the beginning of a new year is usually the time when one sets resolutions for the future, while the first film of director/actor John Carroll Lynch — who sort of traded roles with actor/director David Lynch, who plays a lovely character on the film — is mainly about dealing with the proximity and inevitability of death.
Get Alexandre Borba’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
In his last film, Harry Dean Stanton — who died last September, shortly before the film release in the US — plays Lucky, an old man whose past we don’t get to know too much about. During the entire film, we follow Lucky through his daily, systematic routine in a small town somewhere surrounded by a dry, desertic landscape. And as soon as he is remembered by the doctor, after a small domestic accident, that he is going to die soon — despite his incredibly healthy condition — the film explores the effects of this realization on the character.
I am fascinated by the idea of death. I fear it — most of all, I fear the process of dying — but I’m also greatly relieved to know we are all going to die at some point. As I grew older and had some more time to reflect, the idea of eternity — which was presented to me as a child through religion — started to seem not only absurd but also terrifying. But even in this rational and somehow positive attitude towards death I cannot avoid the emotional impact its idea brings. Most of all, the witnessing of it. Watching people around you go is what I believe to be the hardest side of death, followed by the paradoxal luck in that, the longer we live, the more witness we become.
The film gives us a suggestion on how to face and deal with the reality of death, which I consider fair. And throws light at the character’s present moment, the only point in time one can actively perceive and affect. Which is, at the end of the day, the place to be when it comes to avoiding death. Because death is anywhere but here, right now.
