Necrology

We were shown this little gem of a short film in Mr. Ho's second lesson. I've wanted to write something about it for quite a while.

There is an air of suspension almost throughout the whole film, from its beginning with its title "Necrology", to the last men and women before the credits roll. It is created by the music score (which sounds like the kind very often used in black-and-white silent thrillers), and the viewers' expectation for something to happen (as provoked by the macabre association with the film's title). When the credits finally roll, however, the viewers immediately feel the humor of the director. Although the film is obviously without an obvious storyline, it does create a desire in the viewers to want to know what is going to happen, and provide some sort of "resolution" in the end, albeit in a non-traditional way. Also, like any other good stories, it sets one's mind musing after watching it.

The "resolution" comes when the credits give little bits of information of each character the viewers have just seen in the film. The viewers grab the sliver of information they have, trying to make sense of the faces and figures seen previously on the film - which have seemed so trivial to them a moment ago. Doing so gives them a sense of consolation, and they feel that they have known so much more about what has been happening. Of course, the big irony is, do they really know a lot more? What does it tell you when someone is being introduced as "a man who just got his tooth extracted" other than that, well, he just got his tooth extracted? Interestingly, people naturally think that they know more than they really do.

When I was invited to play a sort of ice-breaking game with a classmate at the beginning of Mr. Ho's first lesson, the first thing I blurted out, pretty much without thinking, was "But I know her!". In a second, it came to me that I had fallen into such a trap.

It sounds like a huge blind spot, but grabbing whatever information we can get hold on and figuring out the rest by ourselves may just be the way we get by. We have to know the name, some basic information and, even better, a story of a particular person before we can feel connected to them as human beings. That is why the media include little stories or photos of individual victims when reporting disasters. No matter how brief or trivial the stories may sound, they bring weight and meaning to the reportage. Without the stories or photos, the news would just be a listing of the number of casualties to the readers/audience, and lose its power to move people and evoke empathy.

This reminds me of a recent read. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book "The Black Swan", writes about how the partiality to what can be seen blinds us. He uses the example of the hurricane Katrina to illustrate that people only focus on what they can see. The reportage of the hurricane, which did not run short of stories of the ordeals and struggle for life of the victims, filled pages after pages of newspapers and countless airtime on television. Attention and financial aids for the victims flooded in as a result. Taleb points out that much less was given to cancer research and patients even though during the same time more of them died every day than Katrina victims - because the former did not get much mention.

Sure we all need stories, no matter how brief or flimsy, to feel connected to each other.

To Death, of course, your identity or story does not matter. Death sees everybody just like how you see the random faces on the short film as they roll by - with equal apathy.