Mark Romanek's film ‘Never let me go’ (2010) is based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005). It tells the story of friends Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth, who have spent their childhood at a boarding school called Hailsham. After years of secrecy, a new teacher illegally tells the students about the actual fate of Hailsham students: they are destined to be organ donors, and will most probably die in early adulthood (Wikipedia, 2019). As the movie continues, we see the three main characters grow up and what their life looks like after Hailsham.

The way that Kathy, Tommy and Ruth cope with the news about their destiny and with death in general fits with the death mentality of the forbidden death. In his book ‘Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present’, Ariès (1974) describes how in this mentality, we do not want to see the dead person or talk about death. We avoid the ugliness of dying because sadness does not belong to modernity. In the movie, the students of Hailsham do not want to talk or think about their destiny as well. For many, it is too painful to realize that death is closer than they would like, and thus they ignore the topic altogether. Most of them pretend they do not even know that they will die at a young age. Especially for Ruth, death is taboo to talk about, because she thinks it prevents her from being able to enjoy the present. The main characters are only briefly willing to talk about death when the possibility to postpone their organ donations arises, but even then they still do not tolerate their fate.

The movie also shows the medicalization of death, which is another characteristic of the period of the forbidden death. Death has turned into something technical: we do not see death as a part of life, but as a failure of the doctor. In the movie, the students of Hailsham pass away in hospitals. For example, the movie ends with Tommy dying on the operating table. Every death includes no rituals and looks business-like, functional, and clean. This, again, shows how the characters in this movie want to avoid death, and are trying to hide it during their lives.

References:

Ariès, P. (1974). Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.  

Wikipedia. (2019). Never let me go.