Jesseca Kusher

I spent the majority of my day Monday sitting in Wiggins Street Coffee killing-off a good friend of mine. That’s right, I was writing a character death.

It’s interesting to me, most of the student short films I’ve seen don’t deal with the topic of death in the physical – if they touch on it, it’s always in the past or abstracted. I think this is perfectly reasonable, creating a death is remarkably difficult – it’s like playing God and I am so afraid of getting it wrong. I know it would be all too easy to make it over-dramatic or not genuine enough.

But how do you write a genuine death?

I’ve developed some very basic criteria, although this was just an exercise for me.

1. 1. First, consider: is this death necessary? The goal is not to make light of an experience that so many people find really traumatic. That said, death is a part if life. If the death is (A) essential to the development of your characters, or (B) a signal of a turning point in the intensity of the narrative (such as the mentor’s death in A Hero’s Journey), then chances are, it belongs in the script.

      

   2. Every action in the scene should be hyper-intentional and essential to the plot.
      While I would argue all dialogue and action should have a purpose in every scene, especially in a scene where a character dies, none of the action should be non-essential for fear of distracting from the death itself. That said, there are always going to be exceptions for every rule. While writing this, I imagined a scene from a movie like Hot Fuzz — sure, the violence is rampant and deaths are frequent — but in a movie between two cops-turned-vigilantes, it feels appropriate for them to cut jokes surrounding character death.

      

   3. Pick a tone and stick with it. In my script the characters are dealing with a sort of supernatural drama, so I want this death to feel real, raw, and painful. I don’t want any supernatural aspects to take away from the scene, so I am aiming for realism.

      

My biggest struggle in writing this scene is keeping it real and grounded without being too painfully graphic. I worried while doing background research on this scene that my browser history could be troubling for whichever intelligence agency spies on such things. I was Googling things like, “College man drowns,” and watching every drowning scene I could find from movies on YouTube. Admittedly, the whole spiral took me to a really dark place.

I am particularly worried about writing this scene because I have a close friend who once watched a drunk college man drown at a party. I was with her once at a small party on the bank of a lake. She had a very serious panic attack when one of our friends, who had been drinking, went for a swim. I held her as she cried and screamed at him to get out of the lake. It was a very surreal and frightening experience.

I suppose my character’s death could come about in another way, but from the place I am trying to center the plot now, the river needs to be involved. In many ways, the river herself is a character in the script as a whole – so I want her to be the one to take my character’s life.

There’s something powerful in the idea of water. It plays a role in religion as the cleanser for baptisms and holy prayed-over substance used to both bless one another and scare off vampires. It’s important that Peter dies there.

I suppose part of my struggle is how fast it happens. I can certainly control pacing more in the editing process, but just as death hits us unaware, so does this death appear in my script. In many ways, it is the inciting incident, so it makes sense that it would occur early in the series — but I wonder if I have the pacing right yet. I think the act happens suddenly – and that’s pretty realistic – but I wonder how long the tension should last from when Peter goes underwater and when they realize he’s not coming back up for air.

In a way, I’m trying to channel some of the styles of French films. There’s something inherently raw, but almost rude about the way that French cinema reads in my mind. I think it’s because they don’t baby the audience the way American films do. Moments of passion are just that – fleeting moments – and while some may linger, heartbreak and moments of sorrow are left to hang without hand-holding resolution or comfort from supporting characters. I really appreciate how many French film protagonists are meant to experience stories alone and how successfully (at least in my opinion) these scenes help the audience to feel alone.

Written the final week of October.