After watching Guardians of the Galaxy a few months ago, I was somewhat disappointed. At first, I couldn’t figure out why. The special effects were stunning, it was well plotted and Chris Pratt was in it (what more could you ask for, really). Then I realized why it had rubbed me the wrong way: the cheapness of the emotional scenes.
Guardians has several scenes that were meant to twist a knife in your cry-center—scenes that, ultimately, had little to no buildup or relevance in the context of the movie in its entirety.
(Warning: spoilers ahead for those who haven’t yet seen Guardians.)
The movie begins with Peter Quill—the man who would become Star-Lord—watching as his mother dies. Shortly after he runs out of the hospital, aliens abduct him. Aside from the fringing of his mother to yield extra angst for our white male protagonist, this scene bothers me for another reason: how unnecessary it is.
Peter Quill’s mother did not have to die. Her death exists simply to advance the plot and to give Star-Lord a reason to be kind of sad and tortured. Her death is distorted so that it is not about her.
The feelings she has about her illness don’t matter, as she is not an integral character. The death of Quill’s mother is a tawdry way for the movie’s creators to engage the audience emotionally without actually doing any work. It’s almost as though the writers said, “Hey, it’s not sad enough that a child was abducted against his will. Let’s throw in a dead mother too.”
As well, the ending in which Groot—an anthropomorphic tree—sacrifices himself is played off as terribly sad and unfair and awful. However, moments afterward, it is revealed that—just kidding—Groot is able to regenerate from the branches leftover from the explosion.
Though it may seem like it, I don’t mean to single out Guardians as a bad movie because it uses death as a convenient device. The movie merely exists as a good exemplar of how death is misused and trivialized so often in movies today. There are myriad offenders. Nicholas Sparks comes to mind.
The “death as cheap, emotional manipulation” trope is so ridiculously common that one can find indicators pointing out quite obviously the ending of the movie. I’ve found in most all cases, if you don’t see the dead body of the person that is presumed by other characters to be dead, then the person usually isn’t dead (often referred to as the dead body test).
I’m tired of watching movies that expect the audience to go along with such forced emotional manipulation. Movies gain their worth through a sense of humanity and realism. When death, one of the most human concepts out there, is trivialized, a movie thereby forfeits some of its humanity.
Death isn’t a device to be used haphazardly. It is irreversible and causes many people (if not all people at some point) serious trauma. It happens randomly and cannot be predicted by standard, popularized plot points. In movies, life is easily taken away and given back (I’m looking at you, Joss Whedon). Death holds little meaning in its impermanence and commonness.
To see death twisted and deformed purely because a plot demands it or because creators want their works to be sad is to make a mockery of it. Rather than killing characters off and bringing them back as they desire, creators should invest more time in earning emotional leverage through character interactions and good writing. Using death to manipulate an audience is done, perhaps, to death.
In reality, death is an aspect of human life that we all must come to terms with. It seems necessary that movies learn to do the same.
