Denys Arcand, The Barbarian Invasions

Arcand is an argumentative filmmaker, or a maker of filmed arguments. This film has stagy monologues, and monologues partitioned out amongst a number of characters in imitation of conversation. (And, most gratingly, as in The Decline of the American Empire, characters make sexual puns while whooping and hooting in imitation of a rollicking good time, or the kind of rollicking good time waggish intellectuals can have.)

Also grating are the Houellebecq touches: the frank chauvinism, the references to Mohammedans and Albanians and Chinoises.

Still. I loved it. Anything that addresses the odd invisibility of death interests me--not violent death, but the way most of us will die, in walled institutions. I recently read Foucault's essay on "heterotopias," the places of exclusion to which we consign the unacceptable. The sick and the old are put in prisons: their uselessness, and worse, their incapacity for enjoyment, are a scandal.

I read somewhere that this film was a denunciation of the Canadian healthcare system, but it doesn't seem so different from hospitals in the U.S: beds in the corridors, people in misery, thoroughly exposed and yet invisible, alone and yet without privacy.

The film is a fantasia of the good death: friends and family around, sympathetic health workers, limitless money, the final narcotic injection from a kind friend. I would like such a death (eventually, I mean; not soon). Mais ca coute.

It used to be that the good death was like the one pictured in this film: time to prepare, to say farewell. According to Phillipe Aries. At the time Aries was writing, the sudden death had become the good death--I mean, people had started to say it was best to be hit by a bus, to drop dead of a heart attack, to be taken unawares, even if this was not how people actually died. And now, now that we all linger so long, one dreams again of the older kind of good death.

The bourgeois will start to buy these good deaths for themselves. The rest will do without. Whenever you talk about palliative care or the right to die or assisted suicide, people bring up the fear that the poor will be subtly or brutally encouraged to die. But what if it's the opposite? What if it's the poor and ill who linger and vegetate, kept alive by all the forces of medicine, warehoused in prisons for the aged, while the rich die good deaths at the seashore?